Importing and exporting

How easy is it to get data in and out?

Mathematics has always been, and still is, a theoretical approach to understanding the world around us. Since this is the case you need to get data in and out from these applications. The most obvious way to do this is to export files. As you will see, you can also communicate directly with other devices and even servers that collect information.

Many Linux Format readers will have projects at home, perhaps to do with home automation. To support these projects, you can use available communication protocols. Scilab and

Octave have packages to do this; they support serial, socket and more. Together with the serial port, you can also add an Arduino package. This makes it easy to have sensors on the Arduino and connect directly to your mathematics module.

Engauge Digitizer is made especially to export an image to a spreadsheet. You take out as many numbers as you want, and that’s about it. Genius has many more mathematical functions and can export to more formats. These export options are great for documents. You can export graphs as PDF or PNG files, and mathematical formulae as LATEX, Mathml and Troff. With Scilab, you have a programmatic interface to Pandoc to achieve great documentation for your projects. The list of formats is too extensive to cover here.

Importing from big datasets is great for backing up your opinions. If you feel that everyone are biased in debates, you can use public datasets to see what the data says. In Scilab, you have advanced statistics and even machine learning modules. There is also an R-module and many specialised toolboxes at https:// atoms.scilab.org. Octave has many similar modules.