The Platemaker Wizard is an innovative software tool designed to automate the creation of Excel workbooks for data collection from microtitre plate reading machines. This Excel add-in simplifies the process of linking experimental conditions with measured variables, making it ideal for researchers working in high-throughput screening and especially in high content screening (HCS) workflows.
With the Platemaker Wizard, scientists can define all relevant independent variables and their values before importing data. The tool then accurately maps these inputs to the measured variables returned by the plate reader. In high content screening applications, where multiple complex readouts are often generated, this mapping is crucial for clean, structured data analysis.
The result is a single, Flat Data table that integrates experimental metadata with quantitative measurements, making it easy to manipulate using Excel’s Pivot Table functionality. Users can then generate graph-ready data subsets without manual reshaping.
The Wizard also automates filter controls within Pivot Tables, allowing users to build multiple tables dynamically for various data views. For more advanced visualization, it integrates directly with GraphPad Prism, generating custom Prism script files that automate graph production based on your experimental design.
Additional features include:
Automatic heatmap creation in Excel for visualizing multi-well plate data
A data cleaning utility to mark and exclude outliers or faulty readings
Streamlined export options to statistical and graphing software packages
This upcoming Excel add-in is designed to empower scientists by simplifying data organization, visualization, and analysis — all within a familiar Excel environment.
The image Gallery of the Platemaker Wizard
Platemaker Wizard Calendar
The Clean Data menu allows faulty data to be excluded from analysis but retained in the container worksheets.
The Experimental Register keeps track of all the workbooks created using the Platemaker Wizard.
The platemaker wizard can automate the exporting of data and the creation of graphs in Graphpad Prism.
The Platemaker Wizard allows you to quickly create heatmaps of your data in Excel.
An example of an image page added to your Excel workbook using the Platemaker Wizard
Importing data using the Platemaker Wizard's generic import feature.
Page 1 of the Platemaker wizard where all the background information about the experiment is entered.
The Platemaker wizard supports both sample repeats and plate replicates which allow the wizard to correctly process new outputs based on combining several measured variables in an equation.
The Platemaker wizard allows the user to control how samples are laid out on a plate by allowing the plate to be divided into multiple subplate areas, with plate controls either included in experimental subplate areas or within their own dedicated area.
Page 5 of the wizard allows the experimentalist to fully control how samples are laid out on a plate using sub plating areas and separate control plating areas if required.
The relationship of a 2D Pivot table produced by the platemaker wizard and how the data will subsequently be imported and graphed by Graphpad Prism.
The Platemaker Wizard can also direct Prism Graph to export its graphs to a Powerpoint presentation.
The Pivot Table Maker included with the Platemaker Wizard. Here users can define how the flat data table is to be reduced into graphable units or define new heatmaps which are directly created inside Excel.
An example of an Excel pivot table of the Flat Data table that has been created using the Platemaker Wizard.
If the user individually adjust a plate layout using Excel's cell drag/drop functionality, the new layout can be copied to other dependent variables that have also been defined in the Platemaker wizard-built Excel container workbook.
It is possible to save common plate designs to a template database to save having to respecify them each time.
As well as a text version of an experimental plate design, the Platewizard can also produce lovely coloured plate maps of your experiment which helps the experimenter design a new microtitre experimental layout on the fly.
The Platemaker Wizard allows Z prime for each plate to be quickly calculated assuming the plates have a negative and positive controls on them.
This video covers page 1 of the Create new Data Entry Workbook Wizard. The tutorial also explains how the wizard helps generate Excel formulas based on measured variables that have been defined on page 3 of the wizard.
This video covers page 2 of the Create new Data Entry Workbook Wizard. This tutorial describes the meaning of a combinatorial and linear link, the effect of changing linking order and the use of the pause build function to make changes to the flat data table before the container workbook build is completed.
In this video we continue exploring Page 2 of the wizard. We learn how to take drug name data from another Excel workbook and import it into the independent variable value list box. We also explore the various functions on the return data dialogue box that control how a 2D matrix of data is collapsed into a single list column.
This video covers several important details that determines how plate controls are defined (page 3) and how the controls are arranged on the plate (page 3 and page 5).
