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."

Comments

Hidden Treasures?

[merreborn]

"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!

Re:Hidden Treasures?

[CaptainCarrot]

It's not a review, it's a tutorial, so it's necessary to be brutally honest -- but you have to make it sound nifty so as not to scare readers away.

Re:Hidden Treasures?

[garcia]

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!

More importantly, don't make normal old features (available in every other data charting software) out to be something more than they are. I found the article to be nothing but boring and sensationalist.

Secret bookcases?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell do you want software that you have to dig deep through in order to get any benefit out of using it?

Re:Secret bookcases?

[Tlosk]

You're right, I should just be able to say into my microphone "Make me a snazzy chart according to my data and design whims. Make it so."

Some things by their nature are always going to at least somewhat complicated if they give you any amount of control over the data layout and graphical design. Charting being one of them.

The reason has little to do with the software but rather with the fact that many of the decisions to be made are arbitrary. There's no one best way of doing it, and depending on what you happen to be doing in particular (the field, existing standards, your audience, your data set) you may have very different rankings on what would be "better" ways of laying things out or what to display and how.

I don't like haunted house interfaces

[orthogonal]

"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.

Re:I don't like haunted house interfaces

[kebes]

I fully agree that Excel (and OpenOffice.org's Calc) has a horrible interface for making graphs. It is frustrating to actually get anything to look the way you want. Moreover, there is no simple way to get a graph "looking perfect" and then apply that formatting style to other graphs. You either have to start from scratch, or copy the graph and then change the data that it is pointing to. Both are tedious. I wish OO.o had a simple way to apply formatting from one graph to another (maybe it does... anything know of a trick?).

However, despite how bad Excel's graph capabilities are, you may be interested to know that there is a better way to select and modify graph items. Instead of right-clicking madly, open up the "Chart" toolbar (right-click on the toolbar near the top and make the "Chart" one visible). When you select a graph, the toolbar will list all the items ("Data series 1", "Data series 2", "x-axis", etc.). You can now pick the one you want and open its properties quickly. This allows you to "get" the item you want.

That having been said, it's a frustrating experience. There is no good way, for instance, to have proper-looking scientific/exponential notation on a graph in either Excel or OO.o calc. These are the types of things that I think OO.o could really be *ahead* of MS Office... It wouldn't take much programming (compared to what has already been done), and it would make OO.o immediately more useful than MS Office for certain tasks.

Made unusable by design

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

God forbid this was an Microsoft Office review

[backslashdot]

There's no way in hell spin like this would be tolerated on slashdot.

"At least it's getting slap on the wrist I suppose."

Anyway, I don't mind this review .. but would like to see reviews of Microsoft products well tolerated on here in a balanced manner.

Edward Tufte ...

[haluness]

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

Re:Edward Tufte ...

[fossa]

I was looking for some choie Tufte quotes on the futility of representing data on a low resolution [projection] screen, and I found this: Does PowerPoint make you stupid?, a pretty harsh slam of Tufte's disdain for PowerPoint. For those unfamiliar, Tufte hates PowerPoint the tool. He blames PowerPoint itself in part for the Columbia disaster.

The first article I linked defends PowerPoint on the grounds that in the wrong hands, PowerPoint can make horrible presentations, much like anything in the wrong hands. It slams Tufte for seeming to claim that PowerPoint itself is bad, pointing out that Tufte's most hated "Auto Content Wizard" are rarely used.

I have attended Tufte's one-day course. In it, he uses projectors to display very little. A few photos, a video clip, and not much else. For every bit of text or data plot, he refers to the high resolution printed handouts or the pages of his books (included with the course). The point I took away from the PowerPoint chapter (the course covers several topics) was that PowerPoint does two things: First, it encourages Excel style (or OpenOffice Chart style) data plots with few data points, distracting 3D "chart junk", and low resolution (a consequence of being projected rather than printed). And second, it presents information in a sliced and disjointed manner. The audience, Tufte postulated, should be able to peruse the information you are presenting in their own style. Perhaps paying attention to what you are saying, perhaps looking ahead or forming questions about the data. A PowerPoint slide limits the available information to what fits on a single slide: not much. The isolation of the slides makes it difficult for the audience to compare the things you are presenting and to think at their own pace. So, not simply PowerPoint, but any low resolution time-isolated presentation is bad. And on top of that Tufte dislikes the bullet style enforce by PowerPoint, which the above article also criticizes as "you don't have to do it that way" (not so true I think; PowerPoint does push hard for the bulleted list style presentation).

But I think the first article I linked misses Tufte's main points. And with PowerPoint and Excel or OpenOffice's equivalents, one must be very careful to not force the audience to follow your presentation word by word. One should encourage exploration, comparison, and thought. Explain the data, then let the audience peruse it. Forcing one linear path will undoubtedly cloud the picture you are trying to present.

Re:Usability, is that you?

[Animats]

Yup, open source usability problem. "What it lacks in obviousness, OpenOffice makes up for in the many ways to find the tools. They're in four places." Bad sign. Worse if some of options are only in some of the places.

This is an generic problem with open source GUI programs. Some features are reached through menus, some through toolbars, and some by right clicking. The interface tends to be determined more by who added the feature than by coherent design.

The original "Macintosh User Interface Guidelines" are still a good read. You may disagree with some of them, but if you have no idea what they are, you shouldn't be designing interfaces.

What are you trying to say?

[Jerk City Troll]

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.

So in other words, you're saying that its user interface is a complete and utter failure?

It needs one more room

[Muchacho_Gasolino]

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.

You Know

[2443W]

... 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...

Re:Usability, is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is a case of an open source app emulating (too well) the miserable UI habits of many proprietary applications. MS Office, in this case.

Re:Try this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but its user interface still sucks. I use gnuplot because I regularly need graphs with over 13,000 data points in them, and I haven't found anything better for that kind of volume. But, really, the interface is trash. You really need scripts to get anything done in a sane amount of time.

Panic room

[wideangle]

Any alternatives when OpenOffice.bloat panics?
http://www.reactos.org/archives/public/ros-dev/200 5-March/002423.html

Grapher, perhaps? (208K download)
http://students.washington.edu/bellc/grapher/viewp ic.php?pic=screenshots/gph0_93/gridlock.gif

Or Gnumeric? (15M)
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/images/gnum eric-sample.png