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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."
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...)
Try this for an explanation.
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?
gnuplot is great. Excel won't even do 500 element charts and can't import csv's with more than 65535 items. Ridiculous.
If by "look at" you mean "compile" your statement makes sense. The source code itself is on the order of 100 MB if I remember correctly, but compiling it does take up much more space due to the intermediate files created, and it does take a few hours on a decent PC.
You should try using Octave as a front-end to GNUPlot! It works like matlab, you can actually manipulate the data to boot.
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.
You *must* try R if you think gnuplot is good. www.r-project.org. R is hands down the best environment for data analysis and graphics. The graphing is so much more flexible than anything I've ever used, and the language makes extending the functionality of the core packages a breeze. I've been using it for over three years now, and it does take some getting used to, especially if you haven't programmed in a functional language before, but the time invested in learning R will definitely pay off if you analyze data or produce specialty graphs on a regular basis for work or school. Every programmer should know R!
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?)
FYI: In any cell type in =Game("StarWars"). A small, space invaders style game will appear.