Last week we talked about some of the great new usability enhancements that are coming with STK 9. Well I continued to play with the software again this week and found another great enhancement that I think we need to talk about, reports and graphs. Now, you know how in STK 8 to get a report or graph on an object you have to right click on the object, go to the object tools, and then go down to Report or Graph, depending on the form you want your data in? Not so in STK 9 my friends! It’s now much easier. All you have to do is right click on the object and then go down to the Report and Graph Manager and that’s it, you are done. All of your Report and Graph options are now in one place. Here’s another little tip for you. If there is a report or graph that you use a lot for an object, you can right click on the object, go down to Report and Graph Manager and click on the arrow next to it, and to the right it will show you recently used reports and graphs for that object. Kind of like a quick report right there. Here are some images so you can see what I’m talking about. The first one is a comparison of how to find reports and graphs in STK 8 and STK 9. The second is the recently used reports and graphs looks like in STK 9.

Pretty sweet right? Well that’s not the end of it. The new way to create reports and graphs is so much easier! Power users will need to get used to it a bit, but for new users, you have no idea! It’s not just finding how to create a report or graph in STK, it’s also an entire new way of creating these reports and graphs styles. There is a whole new panel to simplify the process and this panel is for every object in your scenario. Here’s what it looks like:

Ok so let’s start with the left side of this panel. Up at the top you now have the option to select what type of object you want to run the report on. In this example, we are going to look at the Missile object.  Once you select the type of object you want, the new Report and Graph tool will pull in all the objects of that type in your scenario for you to choose from, so it’s brought in all the missiles in my scenario. Next you select which missile you actually want to run the report from. Below you can set the time period if you don’t want to default for the report. Now over on the right hand side of the panel we have the report Styles. By default you can see all the report and graph styles that are available for that object together, but if you know you just want to see the reports, you can turn off Show Graph types. The tool bar below is just the tool bar for any other STK object, where you can create new reports/graphs, modify them, delete them, whatever you need to do. Below that we have the list of all the available types of reports and graphs for that object, broken up into two different sections. The top section is called My Styles, where all your custom reports and graphs for that object type live. Below is the usual Installed Styles that come with STK for that object. After that you choose how you want to generate it, whether you want just a Report/Graph or if you want a Dynamic Display or a Strip Chart. Then hit Generate and there you have it!

So that’s it for this sneak peak of STK 9. Check back next week where Ed Mackey and I will talk about the new User Interface Plugin functionality! It should be pretty exciting!!

Till Next Time,

 Rocket Girl (aka Amanda)