A.2.5 Toolbar Buttons

There are a number of buttons on the Control Window's toolbar; these are the most convenient way of invoking most of TOPCAT's functions. They are grouped as follows:

Import and export

Load Table

Pops up the Load Table dialogue which allows you to load a table into TOPCAT. If a table is loaded it becomes the new current table.

Save Table(s)/Session

Pops up the Save Table dialogue which allows you to write out tables in various ways. You can either write out the current Apparent Table, or multiple tables, or save (much of) the current session state.

Broadcast Table

Broadcasts the current Apparent Table to any applications registered using the SAMP or PLASTIC protocol. See Section 9.

Table views (see Appendix A.3)

Data Window

Displays the table rows and columns in a scrollable viewer so you can see the cell contents themselves.

Parameters Window

Displays table "parameters", that is metadata which applies to the whole table.

Columns Window

Displays metadata about each column such as data type, units, description, UCDs etc.

Subsets Window

Displays the currently defined row subsets and enables new ones to be defined.

Statistics Window

Displays a window for calculating statistical quantities for the values in each column of the table.

Activation Window

Displays a window for configuring activation actions.

Graphics windows

Histogram Plot

Displays a window for plotting 1D histograms and kernel density estimates.

Plane Plot

Displays a window for making various types of plot on 2D Cartesian axes.

Sky Plot

Displays a window for making various types of plot on the celestial sphere.

Cube Plot

Displays a window for making various types of plot on 3D Cartesian axes.

Sphere Plot

Displays a window for making various types of plot on 3D axes using spherical polar coordinates.

Corner Plot

Displays a window for showing a grid of scatter plots using all pair combinations of a larger list of coordinates.

Time Plot

Displays a window with special features for plotting data which has a time coordinate.

Matching etc (see Section 5)

Pair Match Window

Displays a dialog for joining tables side-by-side by locating rows which match between them.

TAP Query

Displays a dialogue window for querying remote databases using the Table Access Protocol (TAP). This is a very powerful way to access remote data by writing SQL-like queries, and can be used to do joins with remote tables as well as simply downloading data.

CDS Upload X-Match

Displays a dialog window which uses the X-Match provided by the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg to allow fast matching local tables with any tables in the remote VizieR or SIMBAD databases.

Note that other options for joining tables, including matches involving a single table or more than two tables, and joining tables top-to-bottom, are available from the Joins menu.

Miscellaneous

Available Functions

Displays a window containing all the functions which can be used for writing algebraic expressions (see Section 7).

Help

Displays the help browser, open at the entry on the Control Window.

Exit

Queries for confirmation, then exits the application.