Can not load .plw files in PicoLog6 recorded with PicoLog 5.22.8

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amos
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Can not load .plw files in PicoLog6 recorded with PicoLog 5.22.8

Post by amos »

Hi
I'm strugling loading a .plw file in PicoLog6 recorded with PicoLog 5.22.9 SW. Non of my .plw files are visible in the loading window of PicoLog6.
Are there backward compatibilitie issues or I am I missing somehow a required setting?
Thanks for your help.
Amos

Gerry
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Re: Can not load .plw files in PicoLog6 recorded with PicoLog 5.22.8

Post by Gerry »

Hi Amos,

Unfortunately, PLW files are not compatible with PicoLog 6.

Regards,

Gerry
Gerry
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terrypin
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Re: Can not load .plw files in PicoLog6 recorded with PicoLog 5.22.8

Post by terrypin »

Have I understood that right and you've updated PicoLog with no backward compatibility? So if I change my ancient shed workshop XP PC to one running Win 7 or Win 10, and upgrade PicoLog from version 5 to version 6, I will be unable to work with my many old recordings?

Sounds a major design mistake if so!

Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Gerry
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Re: Can not load .plw files in PicoLog6 recorded with PicoLog 5.22.8

Post by Gerry »

Hi Terry,

The short answer to your question is NO, you will not be unable to work with your many old recordings, because they will still be viewable in PicoLog 5, if you have re-installed it in compatibility mode. As Picolog 5 is a tiny program I can't see many people needing to get rid of it because it takes up too much disk space. Better still, if you've installed Windows 7/10 on a platform that is better able to make use of the newer features in PicoLog 6, and you've kept the ancient shed workshop XP PC only for the tools that were supposed to run on it you would have the best of both worlds.

Regarding not being able to load a PicoLog 5 data file into PicoLog 6, the issue is that Picolog 6 is a completely different piece of software, re-written from scratch, not just an upgraded version of PicoLog 5 with some new features, so it does things completely differently to the way they were done in PicoLog 6, and saves different data, scaled in different ways, with different annotations, different encoding, and at different points of capture, that needs to be compatible with a database setup that didn't even exist in PicoLog 5. So, in order to be able to load the old data format, just so that you can view a much more limited version of what you can already see in PicoLog 5, there would be a significant amount of work that would need to be done just to get there, which would result in a significant amount of features and benefits of the new software that you would have to do without, (you might not, at this point, even have a stable enough release of PicoLog 6 that you would want to load the old data files into).

What you have to bear in mind is that PicoLog 5 is a very old piece of software, and backwards compatibility with file formats of very old pieces of software is not always the perfect utopia that people, on first impressions, think that it is. Where the file format is not able to support new features that are fundamental to the new software, and/or not able to make use of key new hardware that has been introduced in the interim period, you gain nothing, and in fact analysis of older data that is compromised because of no longer supported features becomes woefully inadequate. And, if the reason for your concern is that you want to compare old data to new data side-by-side then you would lose very little by exporting the data to CSV file formats from both versions of PicoLog, and then loading the CSV files into the appropriate tool (Excel, plotting tools, charting tools, etc) to perform the limited analysis that you wanted to do in a PicoLog 6 implementation that could only read limited PLWdata files.

Regards,

Gerry
Gerry
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terrypin
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Re: Can not load .plw files in PicoLog6 recorded with PicoLog 5.22.8

Post by terrypin »

Thanks Gerry. Sorry I did not reply sooner but somehow missed this until today, while searching for solution to a new PicoLog problem!

Terry, East Grinstead, UK

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