Tutorial

The tutorial is designed to introduce basic Surfer features and should take less than an hour to complete. After you have completed the tutorial, you will have the skills needed to create maps in Surfer using your own data. The tutorial can be accessed in the program by clicking the button and navigating to the Tutorial book or by clicking Tutorials in the Welcome to Surfer dialog.

If you find you still have questions after you have completed the tutorial, you should consider reviewing the material in Surfer's extensive in-program help. The help is also available on the web. Golden Software's website contains a knowledge base of questions and answers and training videos. Usually, the answers to your questions are found in one of these locations. However, if you find you still have questions, do not hesitate to contact Golden Software’s technical support team. We are happy to answer your questions before they become problems.

Tutorial Overview

The following is an overview of lessons included in the tutorial.

Starting Surfer	Open Surfer and a new plot window
Creating a Map	Create a map with multiple layers
Changing Map Properties	Change the map coordinate system and scaling and adjust the appearance of the map layers
Viewing Maps in 3D	View the map in the 3D view and show 3D vector contours
Saving and Exporting	Export the map in various file formats and save the project

A Note about the Documentation

Various font styles are used throughout the Surfer quick start guide and online help. Bold text indicates commands, dialog names, tab names, and page names. Italic text indicates items within a dialog or the Contents or Properties windows such as section names, options, and field names. For example, the Save As dialog contains a Save as type list. Bold and italic text may occasionally be used for emphasis.

Also, commands appear as Home | New Map | Contour. This means, "click or scroll to the Home tab at the top of the plot window, then click on the Contour command within the New Map command group." The first word is always the menu or ribbon tab name, followed by the command group, and finally the command name within the menu list or on the ribbon.

Sample File Location

The sample files used in the tutorial lessons are located in the Surfer Samples folder. The Samples folder is located by default at C:\Program Files\Golden Software\Surfer\Samples.

Topic Links

Click the Next and Back links at the bottom of each tutorial to browse through the tutorial lessons. The lessons should be completed in order, however, they do not need to be completed at one time.

Next to Starting Surfer

See Also

Using Surfer

Surfer Flow Chart