I was recently exploring a mining consultant’s web site looking at their field data capture/database software when I came across this neat freeware package, Trace Viewer, that they offer for looking at down hole drilling data and which can display a CSV data file. It got me thinking that it could also be used to look at log data from a Nanocom since the nanocom file structure is not too dissimilar to drillhole assay and geophysical data. The only real difference is the nanocom readings are in time rather than depth order.
Trace Viewer v1.1 To download it you need register with an e-mail address. The .exe will also periodically expire and require another download of the latest version.
Your nanocom file will require a wee bit of modification in Excel before it can be read by Trace Viewer. The following is what worked for me.
Delete the first 2 rows of the data file so that the column headers are in the first row.
Insert a new column at the far left and call it “Time”. I then filled the column down with an incremental number ie 1,2,3,etc for seconds as I seem to recall that the nanocom records at a 1 second interval.
Do a find and replace of any spaces in the Column header names and replace them with an “_”. For example “ENGINE SPEED” becomes “ENGINE_SPEED”. This is because the spaces appear to trip up importing the file into trace viewer and the column headers get out of allignment.
Save the file as a .csv, then open in trace viewer.
I've attached a modified version of one of my logs and an example pic.
Ok I kinda see what you mean but if your going to modify the header data in Excel first - why don't you just graph it up in Excel. You only have to set up the graphs once then just copy paste the data in, Excel handels time series data very well and it'll display left right on the x-axis which is more intuative than depth (time) on the z-axis as downhole data is displayed.
Using an excel template also has the added advantage that if you keep doing it and save the results then you can find and historical anomalies in your readings, you get a good data base and graphical reference to refer to.
Yes Excel has some good graphing functionality but personally I find it a real pain to get the graphs set up the way I would like them and even when I set up templates there is always some fiddling.
For me I was able to get more out of this display than the free Graphic Viewer CSV program graphs.
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