What's new in Prism 5.03 (Windows) and 5.0c (Mac)?

 Prism 5.03 (Windows) and 5.0c (Mac)  fix about 200 issues, runs more quickly (especially 5.03 Windows), and include a few new features. This page lists the most important fixes.

If you are using an earlier version, see the list of changes and fixes in 5.01 (5.0b) and also the list for 5.02 (5.0b). This page just lists the highlights. If you really want to see the complete details, see this unorganized list. 

Important statistics fix

Fixed a bug in Fishers' exact test that resulted in incorrect P values in Prism 5.02 and 5.0b (but not earlier releases) when analyzing some symmetrical contingency tables. 

Important changes

• Prism 5.03 (Windows) opens PZFX files much much faster than prior releases. (5.0c Mac always opened PZFX files quickly.)
• Prism 5.0c (Mac) fixes the problem with bar fills and Snow Leopard.

New minor features

• Prism Windows now requires only 576 vertical pixels, so it can run on new netbooks. And only 800 horizontal pixels, so it can run on tablet computers in portrait orientation.
• Improved pasting from Excel. The Paste Special dialog has a new choice so you can revert back to the old method of pasting, but we don't exect this to ever be helpful (but provide it just in case...).
• New option on the Paste Special dialog to paste as many digits as possible, even if Excel shows a value rounded to fewer digits.
• New graphing symbol added to the list after squares, circles, etc.:  a horizontal line (dash).
• You can now choose  X values (as well as row or column titles) as X-axis labels for grouped graphs that plot XY data.
• New checkbox in Step 2 of Magic dialog, to match format of text in free text objects.
• Some find text autocomplete useful as a way to quickly enter titles and text. Others some find it annoying. Now you can turn it off in the Preferences dialog. (New to Windows; this preference is already available in 5.0b.)
• New preference in the New Graph tab to choose portrait or landscape page orientation of new graphs (Mac only; this preference was already in the Windows version).
• Command line switch to not resave the preferences file. This is useful in a teaching lab, so Prism always starts with the same preferences. (Windows only.)
• You can enter special characters by holding down ALT, and entering the three digit character code. (Windows only.)
• You can now launch Prism from the command line (Run...) by simply entering Prism, without needing a path. (Windows only.)

Nonlinear regression fixes

• When you choose a robust nonlinear regression or outlier detection, Prism first performs ordinary nonlinear regression, and then uses those best-fit values as initial values for the robust fitting (which is then used as the baseline for outlier detection). When ordinary nonlinear regression lead to ambiguous results, previous versions of Prism were unable to do robust fitting and so were unable to detect outlers.  Now Prism will use those ambiguous least-squares results as initial values to the robust fit.
• When the data are perfect (the curve goes through every point) previous releases gave incomplete results when you requested robust regression or outlier removal.  Now it works.
• Outliers elimination. A robust fit is used as the baseline for detecting outliers. In rare cases, Prism is unable to complete a robust fit. Prior versions of Prism reported zero outliers. Now Prism alerts you to the problem by reporting that the number of outliers is "?" .   
• Initial values: If the range of fit is restricted on the Range tab, previous releases still used all the data when computing initial values. In some cases, this resulted in silly values for initial values, and nonlinear regression would not converge on a result. Now the initial values are computed from only the values within the included range. 
• Initial values:  XatYMid is now computed correctly, even if the X values are not in order. Ymid is now computed as the average of the largest and smallest mean (of replicates) Y values, not the largest and smallest individual replicate value. 
• Initial values: Rules for initial values have been improved for two equations: Center of Log(Gaussian), and Sum of two Gaussians.
• Interpolation: Improved the interpolation of X values to prevent the nonsense values earlier versions sometimes reported.   

Statistical fixes 

•  Smooth,differentiate or integrate curve now reports output in a staggered format, to handle analyses of multiple data sets with different X values. 
• Nonparametric Spearman correlation. When one data set resulted in a correlation coefficient of  -1, Prism would not compute the rest of the data sets. 
• Spline/LOWESS now work even with missing values.  
• The nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis test and Mann-Whitney tests report sensible results when all values in all data sets are identical.
• Frequency distribution. Smarter automatic bin widths, so the bin width is never a fraction  when all input data are integers.
• Frequency distribution with excluded values. Fixed the problem where the analysis was not recalculated when the data were included.
• Survival analyses. Freezing the results sheet didn't always work.
• Two-way ANOVA gives useful message when matching is totally unhelpful so repeated measures is not needed and lead to division by zero.

Scripting fixes

• The ExportTable command  now supports %F, %N, %S, %X.  
• Fixed the problem when Prism did not evaluate the number of files in a directory, when performing ForEach-Next looping by filename mask.
• Allowed using the "open" command within "foreach" loop without the argument "%F.pzf.
• This vba command will print a file, silently, without Prism opening:

Shell ("C:\program files\prism5\prism.exe /p c:\auto.pzf")