SciDAVis Troubleshooting: Fix Common Errors

SciDAVis is a powerful free scientific plotting and data analysis tool, but like any long-lived open-source project it has its share of quirks. This page collects the most frequently reported problems — each one backed by a real community record (SourceForge bug tracker or the developer mailing list) — along with the fix that actually works, or an honest statement when there isn’t one yet.

1. Numbers pasted from Excel show up as text

Symptom: You copy a column of numbers from Excel, paste it into a SciDAVis table, and the column is treated as text — you can’t plot or fit with it.

Status: Reported as SourceForge Bug #408 (2022).

Fix: Before pasting, select the target column and set its type to Numeric (right-click the column header → set column type). Alternatively, save the sheet as CSV in Excel and use File → Import ASCII — the importer lets you declare column types up front, which is the more reliable route for large sheets.

2. Exported PNG files are enormous

Symptom: A simple plot exported to PNG comes out at tens of megabytes.

Status: Reported as SourceForge Bug #254.

Fix: The PNG export dialog defaults to a high DPI. Lower the DPI to 150–200 for screen use, or — better for publications — export to a vector format instead: EPS, PDF or SVG. Vector exports stay small, stay sharp at any zoom, and are what journals actually want.

3. Transparent tick labels export as black background in BMP

Symptom: Plot elements with transparency look fine on screen but get a solid black background when exported to BMP.

Status: Reported as SourceForge Bug #254. This is a known bug with no perfect fix — the BMP exporter simply doesn’t handle transparency.

Workaround: Export to PNG instead. The SciDAVis team has officially confirmed that PNG exports preserve transparency. There’s no reason to use BMP for plots at all — PNG is smaller, lossless, and keeps alpha channels.

4. Charts are missing after opening an Origin OPJ file

Symptom: You open an Origin .opj project in SciDAVis and the data tables appear but the graphs seem to be gone.

Status: OPJ import in SciDAVis is a reverse-engineered best effort — some Origin project structures don’t translate 1:1.

Fix: First check that the Project Explorer is visible (View → Project Explorer, or press Ctrl+E) — imported graphs are sometimes nested under the OPJ node and easy to miss. If the charts truly didn’t import, re-export the data from Origin as ASCII/CSV and rebuild the plots in SciDAVis. See our step-by-step guide: Importing Origin OPJ files into SciDAVis.

5. Dark mode looks broken

Symptom: With a dark desktop theme, menus, dialogs or plot areas render unreadably — dark text on dark backgrounds, invisible icons.

Status: The maintainer acknowledged on the developer mailing list (2023) that this is a known issue rooted in the Qt toolkit, not something SciDAVis can fully work around on its own.

Workaround: Run SciDAVis with a light system/desktop theme. On Linux you can also force a light Qt style for just this application (e.g. scidavis -style fusion with a light palette) without changing your whole desktop.

6. SciDAVis gets slow with large datasets (10,000+ rows)

Symptom: Tables with tens of thousands of rows feel sluggish — scrolling, plotting and fitting all slow down.

Status: Per maintainer Knut Franke’s reply on the mailing list, there is no hard row limit in SciDAVis — but performance degrades as tables grow, because the table view keeps everything in memory and re-renders on every change.

Fix: There is no setting to make huge tables fast, so work around it: split the data into smaller tables (e.g. one per experiment run), or downsample for exploratory plotting and keep the full table only for the final fit. Close graph windows you’re not using — every open plot adds redraw cost.

Before you reinstall or upgrade: back up your .sciprj project files first. A reinstall never touches your projects, but a failed upgrade or a crashed session can — keep a copy somewhere safe, for example in cloud storage, so a broken install never costs you months of work.

Still stuck? Check the tutorials section for step-by-step guides, or report the bug on the SourceForge bug tracker so it gets a public record.

Worried about whether SciDAVis installers can be trusted? Our guide to whether SciDAVis is safe explains where to download from and why some systems flag the installer.