What I am trying to do is the following: We use LabVIEW to automate our test suite. That part is done and is maintained by someone else. I use LabVIEW to post process the data.
Below is how my code works at the moment:
1. Run the code which opens up File Dialog
2. Select data files
3. Summarize the data into a table and format the table
4. Make over 30 different plots and format the curves (4 groups of plots)
5. Save the plots as images and export them to a PowerPoint
6. Save analyzed data into a data base
7. Exit the program
Steps 3 and 4 are independent. Steps 5 and 6 clearly depend on the previous steps. I took my code and coverted into a state machine architecture for all the reasons that people promote here.
But it is forcing my code to execute one step at a time and made it slower. But the code looks less bulky.