If you ran your samples on the flow cytometer in a plate, you may wish to use the Plate Row, Plate Column, and Plate Figure Dimensions. If you collect a plate in DiVa, for example, DiVa tags each file with a plate ID plus row and column information for the well that file represents. When you activate these Figure Dimensions, Cytobank automatically extracts these values from the files. You can then enable these Figure Dimensions to automatically generate an Illustration layout that corresponds to your plate layout. If your file acquisition software does not embed row and column ID information, you can still enter these Figure Dimensions and manually create the column and row labels, and then let Cytobank automatically filter files by the tube name / sample name into the appropriate row / column tag.

When you activate the Plate Row, Plate Column, and Plate Figure Dimensions, you likely will not want to also activate other Figure Dimensions such as Channels or Timepoints since they contain overlapping file information. You can still define the contents of all of these Figure Dimensions, and simply choose to deactivate the Plate Figure Dimensions when working with the other Figure Dimensions.

For example, you might want to switch off the Plate dimension and switch on the Timepoints dimension if you had 24 timepoints spanning multiple plate rows that you wanted to display lined up in a single row.  Or, you might instead want to switch off Timepoints and switch on the Plate dimensions  if you wanted to display the data mimicking the in-plate layout to check for artifacts due to plate washing, etc.  (e.g. background increases on the right upper corner of the plate).