Thanks to many intrinsic advantages, Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) has become the most common format for graphically representing scientific and other technical information. And the standard for handling HDF data is Fortner Software's Noesys. This brings together three long-established data-visualisation tools and is an incredible package for the money.
     When Excel reaches its limits, Noesys is just getting into its stride. It can accept multimillion-point data sets, work with structured subsets of gigabyte-size arrays, organize 3-D data into neatly ordered sets of 2-D slices, view and edit original data in decimal or hexadecimal mode, and use a huge set of easily customised 8- or 24-bit colour palettes to represent the numbers.
     Now comes the latest release, 1.3, once again the result of worldwide user feedback. The new features it introduces will give you a flavour of its capabilities. For example, it's now possible to create equidistant cylindrical, mercator, orthographic and stereographic projections from global data using image commands. Advanced macros illustrate how to superimpose political borders onto geographic data, and how to project geographic data into an orthographic dataset. There's a new DTED (Digital Terrain Elevation Data™) importer and a new .BMP importer. File opening has been optimised to be 50 times faster for files containing many datasets. Noesys is available for Windows and for Power Macintosh. If you're visualising and manipulating big data sets, there's no competition.