Hidden Treasures in OpenOffice 2.0's Chart Tool 188
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."
hehe nice timing (10 years behind post) (Score:2, Interesting)
due for a rewrite (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't mean to be a sexist, but (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Try this... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:unfortunately, they suck (Score:5, Interesting)
hidden treasures? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Try this... (Score:4, Interesting)
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:
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?
Re:I don't like haunted house interfaces (Score:2, Interesting)
Many lying astroturfers here - try OO yourself (Score:2, Interesting)
Be warned that many of the comments and FUD here are by lying astroturfers [wikipedia.org]. Probably sock puppets [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org]. 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 [angelfire.com] before astroturfing and it's common industry practice [google.com]. 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. [playnow.com.au]
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.
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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 (Score:2, Interesting)
http://labplot.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://soft.proindependent.com/qtiplot.html [proindependent.com]
http://scigraphica.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
These are typically better than oocalc for more sophisticated analysis (labplot uses the very powerful GNU Scientific libs [gnu.org] as backends). Also, better 3-D graphics using the qwt libraries [sourceforge.net].
SON OF A BITCH! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.