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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."

15 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Yarrrr! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Deres gold in dem source code!! YARRR

  2. 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 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. Re:Hidden Treasures? by darkmeridian · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

      --
      A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
  3. 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?

  4. For 19.95 A LIMITED TIME! by palumbor · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  5. Some more fun with OpenOffice.org by codergeek42 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...)

  6. Usability, is that you? by MrNonchalant · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Usability, is that you? by Potato+Battery · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

  7. 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.

  8. Wow by threedognit3 · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  9. I Saw This Movie by Dante+Shamest · · Score: 5, Funny
    "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.

  10. due for a rewrite by Harlan879 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  11. Try this... by dskoll · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  12. Re:Hmm... by dusik · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.