Troubleshooting Prism Magic

Prism Magic (Make Graphs Consistent) is a tool in Prism (starting with version 5) that lets you select one or more Prism graphs and format them to look like an example graph. To enable Magic, Prism keeps track of recently made graphs and examples.

In rare cases, thumbnails of these graphs may get corrupted. If so, Prism will work very slowly (maybe even crash) when it tries to show you the set of examples in the first step of Magic. 

Here are three suggestions:

Update Prism

"Magic" is a complicated feature, and we have fixed subtle bugs several times over the years. Use Help..Check for updates to make sure you are up to date. 

Delete the Prism preferences file

This contains the thumbnails and information about recently used graphs. Note, the Prism preferences file also contains your default settings for graph colors, units, line thicknesses, user-defined equations, etc.

Instructions for deleting the Prism preferences file: http://www.graphpad.com/support/faqid/1209/

Rather than deleting the file, try renaming it first to see if it fixes the problem. That way you'll be able to recover your preferences file if it wasn't the problem. To do this locate the Prism.cfg and rename it to something like Prism.cfgbackup (or whatever). When you restart Prism a new prism.cfg will be made. If you still have the problem with Magic crashing, quit Prism, delete the new file, change the name of the old file back to prism.cfg, and then restart Prism.

Delete example files

Magic also shows you thumbnails of graphs saved as examples. If one of these is somehow corrupted, it might also cause Magic to crash. Try deleting (or renaming) any saved examples. There are several locations used to store the various kinds of examples. Of course, replace "7" with "6" or "5" depending on which version of Prism you use.

Windows XP or 2000:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\GraphPad Software\Prism\7.0\Examples

C:\Documents and Settings\[User]\Application Data\GraphPad Software\Prism\7.0\Examples

[Prism folder]\Examples

Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 10

C:\ProgramData\GraphPad Software\Prism\6.0\Examples\      

C:\Users\[User]\AppData\Roaming\GraphPad Software\Prism\7.0\Examples\

[Prism folder]\Examples

Macintosh

 ~/Library/Application Support/GraphPad/Prism/6/Examples

 /Users/Shared/GraphPad/Prism/7/Examples

/Examples (e.g. /Applications/Prism 7/Examples)