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

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.

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?

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.