Most of us spend a great deal of time looking at data, visualizing it in our mind, and interpreting it for others. I am sure we all have also often realized how much time we spend on the unproductive part of these tasks. How often have you said, “I could have done this faster by hand!” I looked at two free software packages, OceanAtlas (OA) and Atlast, with success, but I wondered what longtime users thought of them. OceanAtlas is for the Mac and Atlast for the PC. Both have extensive data visualization capability and both come with large datasets: thus the atlas component of the names. To start with I sent out an E-mail query to some OceanAtlas users. Since the comments I received were so good, this column will be a collection of their responses. Although most of these comments are about OceanAtlas they apply equally well in most cases to Atlast.

Atkinson, L. 1994. OceanAtlas and Atlast. Oceanography 7(2):63–64, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.1994.08.

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