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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."
Deres gold in dem source code!! YARRR
"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!
Why the hell do you want software that you have to dig deep through in order to get any benefit out of using it?
I feel as if I was just verbally assaulted by an informercial.
"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?
Sorry, I digress. What I really meant to say was "But, does it have a flight simulator?"
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Ah, comparing something to Nancy Drew mysteries, the perfect way to a geek's heart.
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...)
Because you know your software is usable when it's described as 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.
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.
Well I know this is going to make 15 people happy.
I saw this movie. You're going to die horribly.
/. user, you're going to die a virgin.
And since you're a
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
So in other words, you're saying that its user interface is a complete and utter failure?
Join Tor today!
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
I don't know what frightens me more, a Nancy Drew reference on slashdot, or the fact that I got it.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
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?
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.
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.
"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."
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
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...
\u262D = \u5350
... 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...
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.
... I just wasted another frikkin' half hour of my life. ;-)
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Man, I admit I was confused for a few years. I kept trying open office, after an hour and no paper written I gave up. Wait for new release. Try it again. Same deal. I just want to type up some plain old stuff, nothing fancy...like what's with all that stuff??? What's it for?
No one told me it was a VIDEO GAME! Now it makes sense! Who sells the official OO.ogre joystick?
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.
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.
Any alternatives when OpenOffice.bloat panics?0 5-March/002423.html
p ic.php?pic=screenshots/gph0_93/gridlock.gif
m eric-sample.png
http://www.reactos.org/archives/public/ros-dev/20
Grapher, perhaps? (208K download)
http://students.washington.edu/bellc/grapher/view
Or Gnumeric? (15M)
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/images/gnu
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.
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?)
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?