Mechanical Engineering Home > Education: Courses > Shortcourses > Tecplot > Getting Started

Getting Started

You may use Tecplot 7 from any of the Sun, Irix or Linux workstations throughout the ME Building.

If you will be following along with the interactive part of this tutorial, load the data files and start tecplot from the directory where they are located. This isn't necessary, but it will make finding the files a little easier.

To start Tecplot type

          tecplot_on

followed by

          tecplot

If successful, you will see the following window. (Comments are in green.)

Tecplot Terms

Tecplot uses some terms you may not be familiar with. You can take a look at this Glossary of Tecplot Terms for some assistance.

The rest of this page consists of disjoint topics. The first three are the steps that I go through at the beginning of a tecplot session. The remaining are other steps that you may want to take to control the appearence of the tecplot window.

Frame Header and Border

If you want to turn off the frame header, pull the "Frame" menu down to "Edit Current Frame ...". A window will pop up. Click on the box next to "Frame Header". Note: To see the affect of a change, click on the "Redraw" button.

The frame border can be turned off in a similar manner. When done, press "Close"

Reading in a Data File

To read in a data file, pull the "File" menu down to "Load Data File(s)...". A window will pop up. Note: The filter is set to show only files with extension "plt". To see all files, delete ".plt" from the filter and click on "Filter".

Tecplot can read several types of files . To do so, tecplot will run preplot on the file selected

Working with Frames

To resize a frame, click on the arrow button in the tool pallate on the left side of the screen, click on the boundary of frame, Resize handles will appear on the frame as shown in the following figure

Using the left mouse button, drag any these resize handles.

To move a frame, choose the arrow button in the tool pallate click on the boundary of the frame that you want to move. Now move the cursor to the edge of the frame, but not on a resize handle. The cursor will change to a cross. While the cursor is a cross, use the left mouse button to move the frame

A frame may be copied. To copy a frame, click on the boundary of the frame that you want to copy, pull down the "Edit" menu to "Copy", then pull down the "Edit" menu to "Paste". The new frame is placed right on top of the old frame. Now move the new frame to the new position. This copies the data and all settings to the new frame. As shown in the following figure, either frame can be modified