We adopted a very simple approach in our cosmic ray experiments. It is in fact the most common approach in experimental nuclear physics. The responsibility of the DAQ system is to record an event file to disk. Here the role of the DAQ stops and offline analysis takes over. There is an infinite variety of nuclear physics analysis software developed over the last fifty years. You may have heard the names PAW (Physics Analysis Workstation), LISA, root, and a few others. We have used many of these tools and we appreciated them intensely enough to never use them again.
So we adopted IGOR 6.3.4 for all our analysis work. Our DAQ scripts write IGOR-compatible data files. Processing these with IGOR is a matter of drag-and-drop, which is very convenient.
All the plots on this website were created with IGOR. You can appreciate how they look. And no, we are not paid by the IGOR crew for advertising their product. We just like the way it works.
We will provide copies of our IGOR data processing scripts to get your own data analysis started. Please ask.
IGOR is a commercial product available from Wavemetrics. Many campuses own perpetual IGOR licenses. It is worth checking whether or not your campus is on the list.
If you do not like the idea of using a commercial package for data analysis, then we would recommend Python. We will develop example Python programs in the future if there is sufficient demand. It may take a while.
Oh, one more thing. We will use neither Excel nor BASIC for any kind of data analysis. IGOR is far superior to either of these.