Many of the menu commands in Origin 8, particularly in the area of analysis, are based on X-Functions. When you invoke one of the associated menu commands, the X-Function is rendered as an interactive dialog allowing you to flexibly specify input data, parameters for the operation, where the results/output should be written, and so forth.
Some Origin menus -- for instance the Analysis and Statistics menus -- are automatically populated with available X-F based tools. Each time you run Origin, the \X-Function subfolders in the Origin program folder and your User Files folder are scanned and these menus are populated with X-Functions found in those areas. Each X-Function can also have multiple associated Theme files that contain custom settings for the parameters of the function. Many X-Function driven tools feature fly-out menus, allowing you to select a particular Theme from among pre-saved Themes. This figure shows the Analysis: Signal Processing: Smoothing fly-out menu with two user-defined Themes -- "Five Pt Adjacent Average" and "My Median Filter."
The creator of the X-Function can set flags in the X-Function definition file that control whether an X-Function should be accessible from the menu and whether a Theme fly-out submenu should be displayed for that item.
Insert Graph shortcut menu item opens an X-Function dialog box that allows you to embed an Origin graph in a worksheet cell.
The Origin menus can also be programmatically controlled, allowing you to create custom menu items that call user-defined X-Functions. For more information on programmatically customizing the menus, please refer to the Programming area of the OriginLab website.