by
lmh » Tue May 08, 2018 4:42 pm
It looks to me as though the help-file is showing a total ion chromatogram (TIC) derived from a SIM method, where the TIC is the sum of a handful of ions, and the sample is probably a clean standard containing only those ions, so the TIC is nice and clean.
In your case, the TIC is just showing the baseline noise I'd expect in full-scan data, where you're summing a lot of stuff. You have various options:
(1) right-click on the chromatogram and select "MS data view parameters" (if it's not there, look for "Fragment table", but I think you're on Shimadzu's newer software). Now, if your data were collected in scan mode, you can specify individual masses for extracted ion chromatograms, which will be a lot cleaner. Turn off the TICs (check-box) so they don't dominate the Y-axis scaling.
(2) You can also select base peak chromatogram by entering BPC instead of the mass, if you want.
(3) If you collected data in SIM mode and the bad chromatogram is because one of the ions is present as an abundant background ion, you should see the ions as drop-down options in the MS data view parameters so you can still inspect the other ions and make nice chromatograms for them.
(4) If you collected scan data, then next time you can also set up a SIM event to collect cleaner data, and display a TIC from this event.
(5) If you are reporting on specific peaks and have set up a processing method, then the results section, bottom left, will display the data for the currently-selected compound in the compound table. Choose the compound from the "compound" tab in the method-view, and its data, including a zoomed-in chromatogram, will appear on the "compound" tab of the results view.