Plot
Right-click Export () and select Plot () to export a plot from a plot group. Or right-click any plot — for example, the Slice plot in a 3D Plot Group — and then select Add Plot Data to Export.
The nodes are numbered sequentially. To make it easier to organize, you can right-click and Rename the node.
Plot
Select a Plot group from the list, which contains any previously defined plot groups. Select a Plot to export its data. Plot groups can contain one or more individual plots.
Click the Refresh button () in the Settings window toolbar to update the display in the Graphics window of the plot that you want to export after making changes to the selected plot group and plot.
Click the Export button () in the Settings window toolbar or right-click the node and select Export (). You can also click the downward arrow beside the Export button or right-click and choose Export To () to open the fullscreen Export window for exporting to a database. The Messages window confirms where the files are exported as specified in the File section.
Output
From the File type list, choose a file types for saving the plot data:
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Choose Text (the default), for any of these text file types: text files (*.txt), CSV (comma-separated values) files (*.csv), data files (*.dat), or, if the license includes LiveLink™ for Excel®, Microsoft Excel workbook (*.xlsx).
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Choose Unstructured VTK file (*.vtu), for saving to an unstructured VTK (the Visualization Toolkit) file.
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Choose WAV audio file (*.wav) for saving data on the waveform audio file format (WAV), which is an audio file format standard for storing audio bitstreams. The WAV audio file format is particularly useful for auralization of a processed receiver dataset signal in acoustics (for example, for reconstructed impulse responses). The option to export to WAV audio files is available only for 1D plots like Line Graph, Point Graph, Global, Function, Table Graph, and, in particular, Impulse Response plots.
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Choose STL binary file (*.stl) or STL text file (*.stl) for saving to an STL file. The options to export to STL files are only available for Volume, Surface (Plot), Slice, Multislice, Isosurface (Plot), and Radiation Pattern plots.
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Choose PLY binary file (*.ply) or PLY text file (*.ply) for saving to a PLY file, a file format known as the Polygon File Format or the Stanford Triangle Format, principally designed to store 3D data from scanners. The options to export to PLY files are only available for Volume, Surface (Plot), Slice, Multislice, Isosurface (Plot), and Radiation Pattern plots.
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Choose 3MF file (*.3mf) for saving to a 3MF file, a file format known as the 3D Manufacturing Format principally designed as a 3D printing format for additive manufacturing. The options to export to 3MF files are only available for Volume, Surface (Plot), Slice, Multislice, Isosurface (Plot), and Radiation Pattern plots. A warning appears when the resulting file does not seem fit for 3D printing.
Enter a Filename including a path to save it to your computer, or click Browse and navigate to where you want to Save the output. When you have chosen Text from the File type list, you can save the data using any of the supported text file types that you choose from the Save as type list. Click the downward arrow for the File Location Actions menu () to choose Copy File Location () and (if you have copied a file location) Paste File Location ().
Select the Always ask for filename check box (only available if you are not saving to a database) if you want the program to always display a dialog box for specifying where to store the plot data.
If the File type is set to Text, from the Data format list, select Spreadsheet (the default) or Sectionwise. For Streamline plots and Particle Tracing plots, you can also control the amount of data to export. By default, the data contains full information about all points for all particles or streamlines. Select the Only export starting points and endpoints check box to only include one row with the starting point, the endpoint, and the length of the streamline or particle trajectory for each streamline or particle.
This check box only has an effect on particles plotted as lines because plots of particles as points do not contain full information about the particle trajectories.
For line plots that are exported using the sectionwise format, if the plots are for a variable that is discontinuous between line segments, the sectionwise data will also be discontinuous. Smoothing can merge points with almost the same data values but not points where the difference is significant.
If a referenced 1D plot group contains multiple curves with the same x-coordinates, you can choose an output format from the If multiple curves list:
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Choose Append as rows (the default) to append the curve data as rows, which results in a data file where all curves’ coordinates appear in rows and two columns for their x-coordinate and y-coordinate values, respectively.
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Choose Append as columns to append the curve data as columns, which results in a data file where all curves’ coordinates appear in columns, the first one for their common x-coordinate values and subsequent columns, one for each curve’s y-coordinate values. This format can be more convenient for use as input to interpolation functions and for further processing in external software products such as MATLAB® and Excel®.
Advanced
The following options are not available when exporting plot data to WAV audio files. See below for the advanced settings for WAV audio files.
General Options
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The Include header and Full precision check boxes are selected by default. Click to clear the check box if you do not want to include a header, or to limit the precision in the output to six significant figures (and which provides an output that contains all significant figures for data stored as double-precision numbers). If you save the plot data as a VTK file, the Include header check box is not available. For export to STL, PLY, and 3FM files, none of these check boxes are available.
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By default the data is unsorted. Select the Sort check box to sort the data by increasing x, y, and z coordinates.
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If you export data on any of the PLY or 3MF formats, select the Include color check box to include vertex colors in the data export.
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From the If the file exists list, select Overwrite (the default) to replace the data in the file with the data you export, or choose Append to append the data to the end of the file. Appending data can be useful when exporting data for a parametric sweep, for example. If you save the plot data using any other file format than text or STL files, the If the file exists list is not available.
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Select a column separator from the Separator list: Column (the default), Space, Tab, Comma, Semicolon, Colon, or Vertical bar (pipe). If you save the plot data using any other file format than text, the Separator list is not available.
WAV Audio File Options
From the Normalization list, choose Maximum amplitude (the default) or User defined to normalize the signal using the value in the Reference value field (default: 1) as the reference for normalization. The user-defined option can be useful for comparing the WAV audio output of two impulse responses from two receivers that receive the sound with different intensities.
From the Quantization level list, choose 8-bit (the default), 16-bit, or 32-bit float. A higher level leads to less quantization noise and therefore better quality, but the file size will increase.
From the Sampling frequency list, choose Auto (the default) for an automatically controlled sampling frequency. That frequency is set as the number of samples minus one divided by the time span after removing negative times or x-values. Choose User defined to enter a user-defined sampling frequency (unit: Hz) in the Frequency field. The valid range is 0.1–48,000 Hz. If the Sampling frequency is set to Auto, it calculates the sampling frequency from the curve, but when it is set to User defined, interpolation takes place to upsample and downsample the signal.