Grid data using date/times in Surfer

Updated October 14, 2021 20:31

Surfer supports dates and times as valid data! This means you can use dates and times as a data variable for gridding, for creating post maps, and for labeling. You can also format data in the worksheet in multiple date/time formats.

Image of Sample file Axes.srf with date/time axes

Surfer will automatically recognize the date/time data as long as one of these conditions is true:

The data is in an Excel file format (XLS, XLSM or XLSX) and the cells are formatted as dates or times.
The data is in TXT, CSV, DAT, ASCII, or another text format, and the data is in one of the standard U.S. Excel date/time formats, such as mm/dd/yy.

As long as one of the above conditions are met, then you can use the date/time data as any regular data. You can create a post map of the data or grid the data and create a contour map from the grid. The dates and times in the data file are internally converted to a number to grid and create maps from. To convert the numbers back into dates, format the axis labels with the Type set to Date/time and specify the desired date and time format.

If the data is not saved as dates or times in an Excel file, or the format of the data in the text file is not a U.S. Excel date/time standard format, the data will be imported into Surfer as text, not as date/time.

For example, please see Axes.srf (shown in image above) and Temperature_Samples.xlsx in the \Samples\ directory in the Surfer installation folder. For more information, please see: Working with Date/Time Data in Surfer and Label map axes with dates or other custom text in Surfer.

Updated October 2021

Related articles