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

hehe nice timing (10 years behind post)

[atari2600]

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

due for a rewrite

[Harlan879]

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.

I don't mean to be a sexist, but

[layer3switch]

"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."

unfortunately, they suck

[Arthur B.]

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...

Re:unfortunately, they suck

[Tyler Eaves]

Suggestion: Use gnumeric. It sucks considerably less. Not gonna say it's GOOD (but then I wouldn't say Excel is either) but it definatly sucks less.

Try this...

[dskoll]

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:Try this...

[fossa]

Agree completely. My typical data analysis goes something like this: I have several 2D (x&y) data sets. I add more as time passes, creating an abstract time axis. I'd like to able to do something like:

• select all 2D data sets
• perform some identical numeric manipulation on them, creating new data sets. example: calculate mean and std. deviation. of data sets taken on the same day
• extract some of the data vs. the time axis creating a new data set (the time series)
• plot the time series using various plotting options such as error bars at the std. deviation
• repeat with minimal effort as new data is added
• repeat with minimal effort with completely new data sets

Perhaps that isn't a very clear picture of what I'm doing, but if anyone knows of something that can do such a thing, or a better workflow, please speak up. In the past, I have used octave + gnuplot, but the procedural style of octave is a drag (doesn't auto-update like, say, excel does when something changes), and it's difficult to "save" a data manipulation session (scripts may be written, but transporting them to other data sets may not be so easy). Perhaps the only way to go is to bite the bullet and make scripts... Also, tweaking a plot with gnuplot is a tedious code, compile, run cycle. Saving the parameters of a GUI plot (like excel, kaleidagraph, etc.) for reuse is difficult howerver. Isn't there something that does both?

hidden treasures?

[foxhound01]

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?

Re:I don't like haunted house interfaces

[DigitlDud]

I've been playing around with the Office 2007 beta and the charting GUI is real nice. The charts actually look modern now too.

Many lying astroturfers here - try OO yourself

[bit01]

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.

Re:I don't like haunted house interfaces

[XchristX]

Check these out for decent technical graphics and voluminous data analysis:

http://labplot.sourceforge.net/

http://soft.proindependent.com/qtiplot.html

http://scigraphica.sourceforge.net/

These are typically better than oocalc for more sophisticated analysis (labplot uses the very powerful GNU Scientific libs as backends). Also, better 3-D graphics using the qwt libraries.

SON OF A BITCH!

[Just Some Guy]

Yeah, because I like needing eight gigs of free hard drive to compile it with the options I use just so I can build in unknown shit like this. If I somehow accidentally found that on my own, I'd probably figure my machine was pwn3d and reinstall to bare metal. It wasn't funny when MS did it, and it's no more funny when OOo does it.

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.