Get a clear view of simulated and measured data

Present-day operating systems have graphical user interfaces (GUI) that are of great help in designing good user interfaces for application programs. Also, there have been dramatic improvements in computer power and power-to-price ratio. Acknowledgement is growing, even in technical environments, that good man-machine interfaces (MMI) have so many advantages that they are worth the effort of design and implementation. A good MMI can reduce the chance of making trivial errors that could be detected only very late during the simulation process, resulting in a great deal of wasted time. Nevertheless, in the electrical engineering community, programs that are not optimal on the MMI side are still in use. This article focuses on a study of the MMI main issues for a plotting program to visualize simulation and measurement data effectively. The resulting program, PlotXY, was developed in the rapid application development (RAD) environment of Borland C++ Builder, which is distributed for free and described in this article, along with the main ideas behind its interface.