Manipulating Vamas Blocks in CasaXPS
- Complementary Techniques
Here we look at a few function of CasaXPS that will help you in the organisation and styling of your Casa workflows and enable you to manipulate the vamas blocks within your dataset.
- Copy / paste
- Merging Datasets
- Cope processed data
- Deleting Vamas blocks
- Renaming Vamas blocks
The copy/paste function in Casa is a little different to the typical configuration.
The steps are as follows:
- Highlight block(s) to copy
- Navigate to where you are pasting (e.g. do nothing if just making a copy, or open a new window/move to other dataset where you want the block to go).
- Click copy/paste (2)
- Click OK
The above illustration involves making a single copy of a block, if we want to move to a new window – we have to navigate to a new window after highlighting the block(s) to copy, but before hitting copy/paste.
To combine two or more saved datasets into a single file, go to file, open and merge
Then, highlight the samples to combine and click open (or hit enter)
Datasets will now appear in a single file!
When performing a copy/paste function, you can choose to copy across any processing into the new file. If you tick ‘processed data only’, then Casa will copy the block after processing, but will reset the processing history.
This can be useful if you want to do multiple processing steps, but want to start each processing form from a ‘blank’ processing history (so you can perform processing functions, then reset without resetting, for example, an initial calibration).
In the example above, we are copying a block that has been calibrated to carbon. If we check the processing history after copying, it is empty, but the sample is STILL calibrated – because we copied the ‘processed version’ only.
Now, if we want to perform processing actions such as PCA/LCF where we might want to try some parameters, then reset to tune some settings – we can reset the processing history without having to repeat the calibration each time.
Deleting a block is simple! Just highlight the block(s) to delete, and hit the delete button.
Highlight the blocks you wish to edit, and click on the icon labelled below ‘Edit Block ID’ (if you hover over it in Casa it is called Edit Sample ID, but we’re referring to it as a block editor for now to keep things clear).
You are given 4 options to edit.
- Block ID, this is the label of the individual Casa block
- Sample ID, this is the label of the sample identifier (far left column)
- Species Element, this related to the column header above the row of blocks
- Transition, this related to the column header above the row of blocks
References