Today I wanted to convert 26 height measurements I made into a topographic map. Complicating the project was the fact that my data were not spaced at regular cartesian grid points, but rather compass-style at 30-degree intervals from a series of reference points. Within a few minutes of searching online I found this shareware program from 2004 that could take a plaintext file of the xyz points as an input and interpolate a surface, producing this:
Another great piece of freeware that recently simplified some of my other work is this VBA “Decompiler”: I have been pushing the envelope with Excel, and since Microsoft Office is sloppy with its Visual Basic interpreters one must occasionally purge all VBA code from a workbook and reload it – a kludgy process that was automated by the author of that clever tool.