What's new in Prism Windows 5.02 and Prism Mac 5.0b?

Prism 5.02 (Windows) and 5.0b (Mac)  are free updates to Prism 5 owners. We call the updates 'minor' because they don't add many new features. But the effort required to create these updates was not minor. GraphPad works hard to maintain Prism, and these updates incorporate about five man-years of programming and almost that much in planning and testing. Please take a few minutes to update your Prism.

These updates fix about 200 minor bugs, and adds some versatility. If you are updating from Prism 5.00 Windows, also review the list of fixes implemented in 5.01. 

The most important improvements are:

Compatibility:

• Prism Mac now scrolls perfectly with trackpad and mighty mouse. 
• Prism Windows now runs on a display with a resolution as small as 600 pixels. This lets Prism run on new netbook computers, at least those that run Windows and have 600 pixels of vertical resolution (some are smaller). 

New features:

• Hold the shift key to select multiple data sets in the 'Data on graph' tab of the Format Graph dialog.
• Better Undo. You can use undo even after switching sheets and sections.
• Export as compressed TIF, even on Windows Vista.
• New constraint in nonlinear regression (mean X) to facilitate polynomial regression with centered X values.
• Built-in centered polynomial equations.
• You can now launch a Prism script saved in a .pzc file by double-clicking on that file.
• Plots point-to-point lines correctly when a point is off scale.
• /U command line switch to turn off automatic update checking (Windows only).
• Prism Mac can export clear backgrounds and plotting areas to PDF, TIFF, and EPS format.
• Prism Mac now can send to PowerPoint, as well as to Keynote. 
• New preference to choose whether background color should be copied to the clipboard with the graph (or layout).
• You can choose fractional percentiles (i.e. 97.25) in Column Stats.
• New preference to choose the default orientation (landscape or portrait) of new graphs (Windows only).
• When comparing the fits of two nonlinear models, Prism now gives you a choice (on Compare tab) about how to handle the situation where one fit is ambiguous. Pick the other model regardless of sum-of-squares? Or compare as usual?
• New Windows preference to save back to a temporary folder without prompting. 
• You can choose a Navigator font in preferences.

Regression fixes:

• Correctly computes R² from weighted nonlinear fits. 
• Improved nonlinear weighted fits by not applying the weights until the second iteration. 
• If you format a table for entry of mean, N and SD (or SEM) but leave the SD (or SEM) values blank, Prism now weights by N. If N is 3 that point is considered as if you entered it three times. In prior releases if SD or SEM was blank, Prism ignored N (so the point was entered into the calculations once). 
• Correctly reports number of analyzed points with robust nonlinear regression when you enter data as mean, error, & n. Robust nonlinear regression fits only the means and ignores the error and n values, but mistakenly reported the sum of n as the number of points analyzed.   
• Fixed order of parameter entry for some rarely used functions used in user-defined equations.
• Fixed the confidence interval of the X intercept (linear regression) which was too wide when data were entered with replicates.

Statistics fixes:

• The Mann-Whitney test did not correctly adjust for tied values, when the ties were entirely within the second group. 
• One-way ANOVA post tests now work, even if an entire data set has been excluded.
• Fixed DF value in the narrative results view of two-way ANOVA.
• Fixed P value in Spearman correlation with perfect data so r = -1.
• Column statistics now reports results with same number of digits of precision as the data set being analyzed.
• Fisher's exact test reports correct p value for data where the two groups are identical. 
• Fixed initial value rules  in homologous competition equation, two-phase exponential association, and in association then dissociation equation.
• Fixed "K-Y" and "K/Y" transforms, which  did not work on data tables without an X column.
• Fixed crash in Wilcoxon test as part of column statistics when all entered values were identical.
• Confidence bands of survival curves extend to the last time point even if the last observation was censored. 
• Prism no longer crashes when a t test analysis is repeatedly (hundreds of times) updated with new data.

Notable bug fixes:

• Faster graphing, especially of bar graphs with many bars.
• Improved opening of damaged files.
• When you export to PDF or EPS, just the graph is now exported, not the entire page. And you can choose background color.
• You can click on a custom grid line to select it.
• You can use the %N loop variable in more script commands: copy; paste; wcell, wrow, wcol, wtrow, wtcol, import, importlink, insertdata, cleartable, insertdatalink, wtable.
• Two new color schemes
• When baseline is not zero, Area Under Curve analysis also reports the difference peak - baseline.
• Fixed problem with pasting column titles from Excel.
• Smarter pasting when comma is used as decimal separator.
• Embedding fonts in exported EPS files works.
• When pasting data into a data table, Prism now will only paste the top row as row titles if the cursor is in the row #1 of the data table.
• When you launch Prism by double-clicking on a Prism file, it will launch in Japanese if you use the Japanese Prism add-on.
• Angled axis labels are no longer clipped when the graph is sent to PowerPoint.
• Allowed printing projects, with no Print dialog, using "/P" key in the commandline or using "print" shell command.
• Fixed the rule for initial value in the "Association then dissociation" equation.
• Correctly paste values that include a comma,  using settings in the "International" pane in the System Preferences to determine if comma is denotes thousands or decimal point. Also allow commas in column titles.
• Minor ticks now work correctly on log axes with axis limits not at even log values.
• Survival curves. Fixed bug that prevented removing data sets and that caused extra line when X axis range limited extent of curve.
• Fixed ability to change range of two- and three-segment axes.
• Fixed scripting bugs with wrow command, and navigation to subsheets. Default folder for writing results is now the script folder (like Prism 4) not "My documents".
• Fixed problem of legends wrapping.
• Now shades area between two custom ticks, even if one is off scale.
• Automatically unchecks the 'log' option for minor tick spacing when you switch from log to ordinary axis.
• Fixed crash after cloning some graphs.
• Fixed displaced X axis labels on Grouped graphs with offset axes.
• Now imports long Excel files. With Excel 2007, earlier releases could only import one page of data.
• When you hook an info constant to a custom tick on an axis, it now correctly links the value of the constant, not its name.
• Update the name of linked sheets even if you only delete the first or last few characters of a sheet name.
• Properly opens grouped graphs with one row imported from Prism 4.
• Fixed tick numbering for graphs with origin at upper right.
• Scripts no longer stop when a Goto command goes to an empty section (which used to popup the Create new sheet dialog.
• Row statistics analysis now shows row titles.
• Graphs no longer move when data are recalculated.
• Fixed crash on copy/paste two line titles that included Greek.
• Fixed the problem when it was impossible to show column titles in axis labels in the "Separated bar graph", while the source data table had blank row titles
• Fixed the problem when the "Decimate" option in the Paste Special dialog did not work for the Row Titles
• Fixed the problem when Appearance of graph changed, when it was assigned to layout.
• Results tables embedded on graphs sometimes didn't appear properly on layouts.
• Info tables embedded onto layouts, saved on Mac, didn't open properly on Windows.
• Improved opening of Prism 1 files.
• If text object was being edited while graph was exported, the text was not exported.
• Fixed problem with axis numbering with tiny values in scientific notation.
• Sometimes graphs had too large a border in layouts. 
• Even when X numbers/labels are set to be row titles, they sometimes appeared as row numbers.
• After you delete all custom ticks, Prism mac no longer creates one at zero.
• If you hide an axis, Prism Mac now also hides corresponding custom grid lines.
• After fitting curves with confidence or prediction bands and then removing them using the Format Graph dialog, they no longer come back. With Prism Mac 5.0a, the confidence bands would reappear when the analysis was recalculated.