• One of this software's main goals is the consistent display of spectra coming from different sources. At the moment, about 40 different spectral file types from commercially available spectrometer systems can be read. By using Copy&Paste via the clipboard, arbitrary data can also be introduced into Spekwin32 for fast visualization. Unknown binary files can converted into ASCII data for a first attempt of reading their content. Spekwin32 is able to handle UV/VIS, fluorescence, NIR, IR and Raman spectra while the main focus is on UV/VIS and fluorescence.
  
  
• Spekwin32 allows doing many tasks on (series of) spectra that come across in the laboratory everyday life (baseline correction, spike removal, normalization, smoothing, averaging, integration, finding peaks and determining FWHM, showing peak labels, calculation of concentration via Lambert-Beer, absorption coefficient and oscillatory strength, create Raman shift spectra ...)

• As important features for fluorescence spectroscopy there are: calculation of degree of polarization, center of gravity, fluorescence quantum yield; correction of excitation intensity of fluorescence spectra, calculation of excitation spectra from two-dimensional fluorescence spectra, removal of Rayleigh and Raman peaks from EEM data, subtraction of Blank EEM data, displaying two-dimensional fluorescence spectra (EEM) from series of fluorescence or excitation spectra. The EEM functions are useful for pretreatment of data intended for chemometric analysis.
  
  
• To simulate absorption spectra, there is an algorithm that allows fitting of any group of curves (Gauss type) to present spectra.
  
  

• For simple documentation, any number of spectra can be saved together as proprietary Spekwin32 binary file or as two sorts of human readable ASCII files (*.dat and *.csv). Spectral data can also be exported into two commonly accepted spectra file formats: JCAMP-DX and THERMO Galactic/GRAMS spc files. A batch export function allows to convert hundreds of spectra from all file formats into single spectrum *.dx, *-spc and *.csv files. Gemologists will like the possibility to export Raman spectral data into RRUFF format. The current plot can be printed, copied to the clipboard or saved as graphics (WMF, GIF, TIFF, BMP, and PNG). For LaTeX freaks, Gnuplot parameter files and data files can be created that allow producing EPS files directly. The current's plot spectral data can also be copy&pasted via the clipboard.
  

Spectral data was tied to the spectrometer hardware. Usually, the spectrometer control software was able to do some amount of spectral data processing and analysis after recording, but there was no means to analyze the data in a separate place (at home, in your own lab at another department). Often enough, spectra processing was equivalent to blocking the spectrometer from data acquisition.

There was no efficient way to bring spectral data from different sources together within a spectral processing environment. Most spectrometer systems allowed to export data in some way. Being ASCII type data, you could import them into Origin, GraphPad, SigmaPlot or even Excel. However, while these programs were good at general data analysis, there were no dedicated spectral processing features. Did you ever try to bring an absorbance and a fluorescence spectrum into a single plot, do baseline correction, normalize them to their maxima and zoom around with the mouse? A task at least cumbersome with Origin or SigmaPlot and a nightmare in Excel, especially if there were dozens or hundreds of spectra...

Well, we couldn't afford the GRAMS package from Galactic Corporation, and the software from ACDLabs didn't know much about optical spectra at this time. Therefore I took up working on a spectroscopy software tool started by a colleague (Dr. Claus Vielsack) two years earlier.

Since then, I always kept these four goals in mind while developing Spekwin32:

1) Free the data from the spectrometer

2) Bring all sorts of spectra together

3) Visualize/ analyze multiple spectra at once

4) Be useful, or else get out of the user's way

Hopefully, these goals were matched enough to provide something useful...