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Hidden Treasures in OpenOffice 2.0's Chart Tool

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the added-excitement-for-that-big-deadline dept.

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."

8 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Hidden Treasures? by merreborn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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!

    1. Re:Hidden Treasures? by CaptainCarrot · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      And the brethren went away edified.
    2. Re:Hidden Treasures? by garcia · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Secret bookcases? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  3. I don't like haunted house interfaces by orthogonal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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?
    1. Re:I don't like haunted house interfaces by kebes · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  4. Made unusable by design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Usability, is that you? by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.