Pickard writes that mediocrity is fine, if one has not been exposed to excellence... shall we take it that he has not been exposed to a Macintosh running Igor Pro? In any case, Igor *is* a most excellent package for plotting enormous data sets, it has academic pricing, and can be found at www.wavemetrics.com
It is able to import the usual types of data files, plus it can import arbitrary binary files. Try that in Excel! Output is postscript. It is available for wintel and Macintosh platforms, and a demo version is available on their website. - andrew johnson 122 15' 20'' West Longitude 37 51' 18'' North Latitude 208'/63.4m Street Elevation
