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

Yarrrr!

[Anonymous Coward]

Deres gold in dem source code!! YARRR

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.

Re:Hidden Treasures?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try this for an explanation.

Re:Hidden Treasures?

[darkmeridian]

Being a hardcore Microsoft Office user, I thought there was a Myst-simulator in OpenOffice a la the flight simulator in Excel. Thank you for bashing my dreams.

Re:Hidden Treasures?

[Ohreally_factor]

You're almost there, but you're not quite getting it. Apparently oo 2 is so bad, they're repackaging it as a first person shooter.

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.

For 19.95 A LIMITED TIME!

[palumbor]

I feel as if I was just verbally assaulted by an informercial.

Re:For 19.95 A LIMITED TIME!

[TubeSteak]

:SLAP: Buy OpenOffice 2.0.1 or else
BITCH!

Now you can say you've been physically assaulted by an infomercial too :O) ..wha? It's free?
Sorry for slapping you dude.

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.

Re:I don't like haunted house interfaces

[flynt]

You *must* try R if you think gnuplot is good. www.r-project.org. R is hands down the best environment for data analysis and graphics. The graphing is so much more flexible than anything I've ever used, and the language makes extending the functionality of the core packages a breeze. I've been using it for over three years now, and it does take some getting used to, especially if you haven't programmed in a functional language before, but the time invested in learning R will definitely pay off if you analyze data or produce specialty graphs on a regular basis for work or school. Every programmer should know R!

But can it compete with MS-Office!?

[merc]

Sorry, I digress. What I really meant to say was "But, does it have a flight simulator?"

Slow news day

[kentrel]

Ah, comparing something to Nancy Drew mysteries, the perfect way to a geek's heart.

Some more fun with OpenOffice.org

[codergeek42]

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...)

Re:Some more fun with OpenOffice.org

[chriswaclawik]

Sadly, in the time it takes to open up OpenOffice I can load the level I'm on in Far Cry. :)

Usability, is that you?

[MrNonchalant]

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.

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.

Re:Usability, is that you?

[Potato Battery]

You are sitting in front of a computer. There is an icon on the desktop.

>Make chart.

Can't do that now.

>Launch OpenOffice

You are magically transported from the chair, though the monitor, to the other side, a huge, mysterious old house with lots of long halls, secret bookcases, dark closets and creaky doors. It is getting very dark. You could be eaten by a grue.

>Light lantern. Make chart.

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.

Re:Made unusable by design

[djSpinMonkey]

I don't know, man. It looks like you could kind of use that auto-spellcheck, even if it is aggrivating.

Wow

[threedognit3]

Well I know this is going to make 15 people happy.

I Saw This Movie

[Dante Shamest]

"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."

I saw this movie. You're going to die horribly.

And since you're a /. user, you're going to die a virgin.

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?

I'm scared.

[gooman]

I don't know what frightens me more, a Nancy Drew reference on slashdot, or the fact that I got it.

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.

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...

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?

Oh, thanks ...

[kitzilla]

... I just wasted another frikkin' half hour of my life. ;-)

Re:Hmm...

[dusik]

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.

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.