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Hidden Treasures in OpenOffice 2.0's Chart Tool
Jane Walker writes "Take a tour of the multi-layered charting tools of OpenOffice 2.0's Charting Wizard, as you learn to create, edit and master the art of making a polished chart." From the article: "The chart features in OpenOffice are like a mystery-lover's dream vacation: a huge, mysterious old house with lots of long halls, secret bookcases, dark closets and creaky doors that, when you peer behind them, reveal wonderful secrets."
Deres gold in dem source code!! YARRR
"Hidden Treasures"?
"mystery-lover's dream vacation"?
"huge, mysterious old house with lots of long halls, secret bookcases, dark closets and creaky doors that, when you peer behind them, reveal wonderful secrets"?
Here's a hint: if you're trying to write a positive review of software, try not to use analogies that indicate that the UI is arcane and unintuitive!
Why the hell do you want software that you have to dig deep through in order to get any benefit out of using it?
I feel as if I was just verbally assaulted by an informercial.
How about a good book on doing good charts to begin with? I've seen online charts that can be confusing because someone picked the wrong colors.
"a huge, mysterious old house with lots of long halls, secret bookcases, dark closets and creaky doors that, when you peer behind them, reveal wonderful secrets."
Yeah, they perfectly emulate Microsoft Excel charts: you get to click around with the mouse, hoping you'll hit the magic spot to get the context menu for the attribute you want. "Ok, X-axis. Last time it I clicked here and then here. I mean here, wait over here." There's not even a damned menu that shows all the options.
Whereas, with gnuplot I get no GUI but reproducible results from a simple text file. With gnuplot, I can set the colors, I can set the output size, I can specify the output format. No magic, no "secret bookcases." And I can pipe the data from other processes.
gnuplot wins for anything serious.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
That really is a great phrase the article inadvertantly coined there. I propose that "secret bookcase" hereby become standard jargon for an interface feature which violates the Principle of Least Astonishment in some truly astonishing way.
Sorry, I digress. What I really meant to say was "But, does it have a flight simulator?"
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Ah, comparing something to Nancy Drew mysteries, the perfect way to a geek's heart.
Open up OpenOffice.org Calc, and enter the following into any cell:
:-)
=Game("StarWars")
Enjoy!
(Thanks to ChrisWhite on IRC a few months ago for this tidbit...)
Why it almost has as much charting functionality as Excel 95! Stop the presses! Slashdot exclusive!
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Because you know your software is usable when it's described as a huge, mysterious old house with lots of long halls, secret bookcases, dark closets and creaky doors that, when you peer behind them, reveal wonderful secrets.
How about instead, they make the thing intuitive. There are SO MANY options turned on at start that it's not usable, and trying to find those is enough to make me remove OO every time and go use some other program.
I'm trying to type and the the blasted thing is auto indenting, auto fixing, auto guessing my words and generally pissing me off. And finding those and more aggrivating options to turn off, is akin to battling library version conflicts while compiling in linux.
Well I know this is going to make 15 people happy.
There's no way in hell spin like this would be tolerated on slashdot.
.. but would like to see reviews of Microsoft products well tolerated on here in a balanced manner.
"At least it's getting slap on the wrist I suppose."
Anyway, I don't mind this review
Once you're past the first few paragraphs it's a typical intro level tutorial. The article does not take you into any undocumented/hidden features, easter eggs, or into some Myst-like labyrinth of sub-menus. A typically written "Getting Started with..." guild for OO.o charts.
I saw this movie. You're going to die horribly.
/. user, you're going to die a virgin.
And since you're a
reading http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0961392142/sr=8-1 /qid=1141783044/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2339143-6068702?_ encoding=UTF8
would be a good place to start
Well MS Office has had that for 10 ye^H^H/ 0320253
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/06
oh, no it hasn't
"...like a mystery-lover's dream vacation: a huge, mysterious old house with lots of long halls, secret bookcases, dark closets and creaky doors that, when you peer behind them, reveal wonderful secrets."
I dunno about you, but I don't want to "peer behind" any doors or closets if we're talking about a "mystery-lover's dream vacation."
you make a funny!
So in other words, you're saying that its user interface is a complete and utter failure?
Join Tor today!
I am not trying to troll here. I read the post a couple days ago that OO is 10 years behind MS Officer and i remember Office 97 having that flight simulator in the dark. Hehe. Go figure :P
the source code contains a good dose of profanity...
If I wanted to read poetic drivvel, I would not try to find it on /.!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I don't know what frightens me more, a Nancy Drew reference on slashdot, or the fact that I got it.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
I have been trying to find error bars in OO.org for an eternity, and I see them in one of those screen shots. YES! (I don't have any real statistical need, but they're part of the requirements for my ugrad. physics lab reports. Hopefully it'll all spit out into Microsoft formats correctly)
Why not fork?
Maybe Calc does have an ancient mansion to explore, but I still can't display the equation of a trendline. As a college physics student, this means I write my lab reports in Writer and make my charts in Excel.
Uh, ridiculous. The charting code works, barely, but it's full of weird bugs, interface wackiness, and major, huge, usefulness-preventing limitations. My understanding is that a from-scratch rewrite of the Chart code was on the table for 2.0, but they didn't have the resources to do it and it got delayed, probably until 3.0. I use Chart for quick-and-dirty graphs when exploring data, but for real production graphs I use Grace.
Hot-linking sheets to a CSV file First of all, you can link a sheet to a CSV file (a comma-delimited format that is very easy to generate from the computer language of your choice) It will auto-update the data and hence any charts linked to it from other sheets automagically when you reenter the spreadsheet file. To do the linking, right-click on a tabsheet tab, choose "new tab", then create it from the CSV file via the option in the appearing dialog and make sure the "Link" checkbox is checked. Scatter XY charts versus line charts Never ever use the line charts (the first option in the chart glyph selector) the XY scatter plot has the same abilities, plus can do trend lines and has much better auto-scaling abilities. Obviously, you will need to have a column of the X values (easily created) to make this work. Creating a trend line Click furiously/erratically on the physical data line in the graph and when it has little boxes all over it go right click->properties. The UI here is attrocious- I think you need to single click, then double click, then single click again to get the little boxes that allow you to set the trend line :)
"The chart features in OpenOffice are like a mystery-lover's dream vacation: a huge, mysterious old house with lots of long halls, secret bookcases, dark closets and creaky doors that, when you peer behind them, reveal wonderful secrets."
Somehow when I read that, I kinda figured the article had to be written by a woman. If it was written by a man, it perhaps could have been written like this;
"Some of the chart features in OOo are convoluted and hidden. Some may find it annoying, and others may find it surprisingly enriching."
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
really... I work in finance where virtually everyone uses excel. Try plotting a 1000 points chart in OOo. It will take a very noticeable time and the default behavior will be to have an ugly "row" written under every point! In excel the graph appears instantaneously and looks neat. Actually excel is the only software I miss under linux (cxoffice rulez though)... many people mention photoshop, but the gap between OOo calc and excel is 1 order of magnitude more than between photoshop and the gimp. At least for my use. It's really too bad :(
Kchart is also slow as hell by the way.... I wonder what;s specific with excel's implementation of charts...
\u262D = \u5350
"Ah, comparing something to Nancy Drew mysteries, the perfect way to a geek's heart."
The perfect way to a geeks heart is a Dremel to the ribcage.
... the funniest part of this all is that i just finished cursing the chart creator after spending ~ an hour trying to get a chart to have something intelligent on the x axis. I got so frustrated that i took a break and decided to check /. for anything new. Instead of a treasure hunt a easily useable chart creation interface would be nice. Like maybe one that doesn't want my x axis values to by the titles. If I could just manually assign the values along the axis...
Tufte Disagrees.
My favored analogy for a sprawling, unplanned, grew-by-accretion software product is the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. So the chosen analogy happened to strike me in the worst possible way. I've worked on and with too many WMH projects already.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Try making a chart with more than a few hundred data points. Go eat supper while your computer grinds, churns and overheats.
Then resize the chart. Eat, grind, churn, overheat.
Head over to GNUPlot. Plots those hundreds of data points in under a second. Thank you.
re: Hidden Treasures in OpenOffice 2.0's Chart Tool
What the heck is so hidden about it?
It does charting. It does it well. It's one thing OOo does better than M$ Office, and is actually a little more intuitive. What is so hidden about it?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
... I just wasted another frikkin' half hour of my life. ;-)
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
But it's the best I've seen so far. The selection of output terminals is bloody awesome -- even if no two work the damn same way. And the MetaPost terminal is great for use with LaTeX.
Anyone have any tips on making gnuplot less of a bitch to work with?
Man, I admit I was confused for a few years. I kept trying open office, after an hour and no paper written I gave up. Wait for new release. Try it again. Same deal. I just want to type up some plain old stuff, nothing fancy...like what's with all that stuff??? What's it for?
No one told me it was a VIDEO GAME! Now it makes sense! Who sells the official OO.ogre joystick?
I kid you not:
http://www.r-project.org/
there may be hidden treasures, so well hidden that i didn't learn a thing from reading that article! anyways, seems to me the biggest thing holding OO.o back from mainstream acceptance is "easily" being able to do a regression curve and display its equation for xy-scatter and line charts...c'mon guys, i'm no programmer, but it can't be *that* hard to implement, can it?
Linux is to the internet as Duct Tape is to the Universe.
NONSENSE, partly.
"Thus, the fact that there were 90,000 L of jet fuel on a few floors of the WTC does not mean that this was an unusually hot fire."
Agreed, it was not unusually hot. And most of the jet fuel exploded in a huge fireball outside the WTC.
I just realised the author is a chick. If you're reading this Solveig Haugland, ignore my parent post and go out with me.
I create a bar chart (showing time to completion for various benchmarks) from a spreadsheet. So far so good. Next I consider: gee, it would sure be great if each bar was labeled with its value. For instance, if a bar has the value 86.51, it should have the text "86.51" floating somewhere in its vicinity. Unfortunately, no option to enable such behavior (which seems as though it would be the expected behavior for most users) seems to exist, so I resort to inserting text over the chart.
I think I'll stick with gnuplot or similar in the future.
Although I tend to use oocalc for most data (I work in Science), it is absolutely horrible for making chars. I cannot even select a column for error bars. Now who is possibly going to use this except for a very quick and dirty idea of how its gonna look.
It's horrible!
testicles.
Martini Glasses
While Excel is fine for "quick and dirty" plotting & Gnumeric (and other spreadsheets) are "O.K.," none of these are really intended for plotting. My personal favorite is grace, but there are plenty of others like ploticus, gnuplot, gri, Scigraphica, and hippodraw.
It's tutorials like this that help MS Office keep its marketshare, and ensure that Office 2006's only real competition is against prior versions of Office.
No serious business is going to have its employees use OpenOffice when, for less than $400 per desktop, can buy Office and save on employee training, collaboration, and efficiency.
-David
Any alternatives when OpenOffice.bloat panics?0 5-March/002423.html
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http://www.reactos.org/archives/public/ros-dev/20
Grapher, perhaps? (208K download)
http://students.washington.edu/bellc/grapher/view
Or Gnumeric? (15M)
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/images/gnu
It took 17 hours on my PC (733MHz P3). And it needed 4G free disk space on my tmp drive. Without Java compiled in and not running anything else I have compiled oo in 12 hours.
Be warned that many of the comments and FUD here are by lying astroturfers. Probably sock puppets too.
The reality is that this review is a useful introduction to open office chart, and open office chart and open office in general work just fine.
Remember, OO is open source; you can download it any time you like and make your own decision. No need to believe me or the astroturfers.
M$ and other companies have multi-million dollar incentives to pollute forums like slashdot. e.g. M$ makes $40,000,000,000+ per year. A tiny 1% drop in that revenue is $400,000,000. That pays for an awful lot of marketing propaganda and given the size and global influence of slashdot's readership a 1% drop (or more!) is easily possible over the long term.
Given M$'s business ethics (i.e. if it's halfway legal and it makes money it's ethical) do you honestly think that they won't be going all out? The marketing industry in general regards astroturfing as a legitimate tool. Keep in mind that marketers aren't stupid and can be very sophisticated in their manipulativeness, including fake conversations, fake moderation and entire fake websites.
M$ will be using a third party marketing firm to get plausible deniability when they get caught and also to reduce the impact on the morale of their own developers. M$ has been caught many times before astroturfing and it's common industry practice. Other examples on slashdot that can trigger astroturfing are Adobe's cash cow Photoshop whenever gimp is mentioned and the RIAA whenever copyright and patents are discussed. Astroturfing even happens off the net.
Common astroturfer tactics on slashdot are to emotionally associate open source with something bad, to apply a negative argument to open source that applies equally to all software, to apply a positive argument to commercial software that applies equally to all software, to pretend that commercial licenses are less onerous than open source licenses, to gloss over the fact that readers can download and test open source for themselves, to flood technical stories with irrelevant tachnical information about a commercial product only vaguely relevant to the article at hand, to flood the slashdot editors with commercial propaganda article submissions, and to flood open source discussions with irrelevant nonsense to drown out rational discussion and evaluation.
I have no connection with either OO, M$ or the marketing industry. I just hate liars.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
And you can even use R within PostgreSQL with plr.
http://blog.grcm.net/
"There is often a large old-fashioned house or mansion with a creaking door, which often slams shut after people enter ... There will usually be an old man or woman who warns everyone of a supernatural threat, but no one believes him/her ... people will choose dead-ends and dark places over logical exit routes" - Horror Movie Cliches
Reduce, reuse, cycle
I'd have to say that the charting tool is the weak point in OOo. Very weak. The best thing that can be said about it, is that it allows you to have the first column as data labels for X-Y scatter plots where the second column ix the X. It sure beats the Excel "now you have to change the labels one by one manually". I sure has come in handy when I wanted to quickly ascertain that the pile layout I calculated on the fly was good by having it plotted with the label of each pile indicated. You could also map cities with their names beside them and many other nice things. Another good point is how you can easily use image files for the markers of the data series... but can still easily revert back to the original system markers. That is something I never managed to figure out how to do in Excel (the reverting back thing). That being said, the charts seriously need to allow the user to specify independently the x and y range (and why not the label range) of each data series independently. Oh, for quick chart building, using the current behaviour as the default is OK... but you should be able to have the X to the right of your y if you so wish.... and not all the series sharing the same X column if you don't want to. Another problem is the lack of styles for charts. OOo has styles for everything, but there is no way to quickly change the formatting of a chart. You have to change every bloody Title, scale numbering, chart background on every chart that you ever do. This is just dreadful.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
"mystery-lover's dream vacation" just started a lot of radars in my gaydar ... :-) not that I have something against gay people, it's just... so... gay! something that you'd expect to hear while watching Will&Grace or QueerEye.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
This is just my personal opinion, but I love the way gnumeric handles graphs.
I am a scientist, and make a large number of scatter plots. Sometimes I connect the points, sometime no.
I like the fact that the setup for it is a lot like excel at first. I am used to this, and can do it quickly.
But handling the graphs is very much like Origin. Each graph has just one properties page, describing the entire graph. It has a nice layered structure to it, and makes it easy to find just what you want. The level of control is fantastic, and it is easy to find almost any control you want.
I now try and avoid Excel at all costs.
Finally, if you are designing your own manipulations, matplotlib is O.K. You can write fairly short python scripts & matplotlib has slightly easier (so some would say better) GUI manipulations than gnuplot. Neither matplotlib nor gnuplot would be my first choice for publication quality graphs. You should really give Grace a try.
You're right, making software easy to use might be easy enough if you have a good devoted UI designer who can make changes in a flexible way without breaking stuff or needing to reorganise the way various libraries of functions relate to each other.
But when you have a big, ugly codebase that you inherited, making, testing and verifying changes is difficult. Especially when you have only a few fulltime developers for a whole suite of applications.
It's going to take time; they are putting a lot of work into improving the codebase so that it's better for coders joining the project - if/when they manage to do this openoffice users will see a faster rate of improvements.
I often read "it can't be that hard" comments - don't you think if it was that useful and that easy to fix it would've been done by now?
Grow up, folks. Stupid stunts like this hurt far more than they help. From now on, whenever people bitch about how slow OOo is, MS fanboys will have legitimate reasons to point and laugh. For that matter, I probably will too. Is it slow because it's complex and powerful, or slow because there are 300 other Easter eggs hiding out in there?
Seriously, yank this crap out and forget it never existed.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This is the single worst recommendation for using Open Office I have ever seen. This is exactly what professionals want to avoid