Sometimes we need other programs...

Scilab is a very powerful package including tools of very different fields. However, very often we need to link Scilab to other programs: in almost any field of knowledge there are accessible packages to perform specific tasks. Some of the reasons for this linking are:

• We have to access some data processing not implemented in Scilab. Since Scilab is an interactive program, we want to carry out some intermediate processing (not present in Scilab) before going ahead with Scilab.
• The vectorial approach underlying Scilab is a very powerful tool that can be analogous to a spreadsheet, allowing the management of very complex structures of data. We can extract almost any part of a matrix under very different conditions and transform the data in almost any imaginable way. Our new data can be used by other programs.
• The external package lacks some capacity present in Scilab. Typically, the graphic facilities of Scilab and the possibility of exporting results to different formats imply that we can use Scilab in a similar way to how Gnuplot is often used.
• Since we feel more comfortable using Scilab after some time of use, we do not like to learn the new commands necessary to run other packages.
• We want to check the result of some kind of processing to be sure that we are obtaining the right results.

This tutorial is dedicated to the connection of Scilab with other packages and expands the tutorial of Scilab also present in Neurotraces.