You may want to try out one of the virtual PC softwares such as VirtualBox (which is free). Each virtual PC you create (which can have any major operating system you would like installed) is completely isolated and you can be very brave playing around with it. If it crashes or catches a virus, no problem - just reset it back to its original fresh install state.

I have very limited experience with this technology so far but I know others who swear by this method. (I've been playing around with VirtualBox recently.)

Whenever I need to graph something I reach for a spreadsheet. e.g. OpenOffice Calc.  The Calc program offers quite a few chart types: (e.g. column, bar, pie, area, line, XY scatter, Net, stock, column and line.) It takes a little bit of effort to learn how to get the graph looking like you want, but the results are pretty good. However, getting a decent .PNG file requires some trickery: long-story-short - first export the spreadsheet document as a PDF file then use a screen capture program to capture the image in the resolution you need by using the zoom function in the PDF display program. Below is an x-y line graph I threw together recently for some work I was doing over on the Drupal project...

However, I understand that there is a new (better) fork of the OpenOffice project, since Oracle aquired Sun...
But as mouser suggested, there are probably better alternatives.

...and the Magic version requires no RegEx syntax knowledge! All the power of RegEx without the pain.

-Carol Haynes (October 14, 2010, 03:28 AM)

Regex is like a very powerful complex weapon - you better learn precisely how it operates and use it very carefully or you will shoot your foot off!

The only guaranteed way to use regex safely and effectively is to spend the time it takes to really learn them. For that, there is: Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl. I can honestly say that this is the most useful book I have ever read. (I was a software engineer for 20 somthing years before I took the plunge into regex - reading this book (4 times so far), has literally changed my life very much for the better.)

I use RegexBuddy all the time but have no need for the RegexMagic product.