New Chart features in OpenOffice.org 3.2

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Tuesday, 06 Oct 2009

New Chart features in OpenOffice.org 3.2

Ingrid Halama

Interested in the new Chart features that will be available in OOo 3.2? Have a look:

Bubble Charts

The Bubble Chart is available as new chart type now. Bubble Charts are similar to the XY Charts, but in addition to the x-and y-value for each data point a third value is used to influence the size of the bubble.

This issue was one of the top voted feature request recently within the chart with something around 50 votes.

Filled Net Chart

Another new chart type in OpenOffice.org 3.2 is the Filled Net Chart. The Filled Net Chart is similar to the regular Net Chart with lines, but the area between the lines and the origin is filled in addition.

Rotate Data Labels

The options for data labels have been extended further. It is possible now to rotate them. This is useful especially for column charts to avoid overlap between the different labels.

Display of hidden cells

Did you ever had a spreadsheet where some columns or rows are hidden? You now can decide whether those values from hidden cells should be included into a plot within a chart or not. Just set the check box in the properties dialog of the data series.

Chart Context Menu

The context menu within charts and parts of the menu have been reworked to address some usability issues.
For example the common entry "Object Properties" has been replaced by something more descriptive. The offered command in the context menu now shows the name of the selected object. So it says for example 'Format Legend...', 'Format Title...' instead of only 'Object Properties...'.
The commands 'Insert Titles...', 'Insert Legend' and 'Insert/Delete Axes...' have been added to the context menu in case the chart area, the chart wall /floor or nothing is selected.
Access to the data series properties is now also offered in the context menu of a single data point. So you are not lost anymore if you have clicked a second time on the same series.
A new entry 'Insert R²' is offered in the context menu of an equation in case R² was not added so far. Otherwise 'Delete R²' is offered. In the context menu of a trend line a new entry 'Insert R² and Trend Line Equation' is offered in case no equation was added so far.

The behavior of the Insert menu within charts now is selection dependent. In case a single data series is selected or an element belonging to a single data series the additional elements ( like error bars, data labels, trend lines or mean value lines) are only inserted for this single series. Otherwise the additional elements are added to all existing series.

Chart Element Selector

A list box containing the chart elements was added to the formatting tool bar within the chart. Selecting an item in the list does select the according element within the chart. Pressing the new button named 'Format Selection' next to the list opens the properties dialog for the selected element and allows to manipulate the formatting

tags: chart features openoffice.org

Posted by Ingrid Halama on 06 Oct 2009 | PermaLink |

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Comments

Tommy said:

this new chart features rock!!!

Posted by Tommy on October 06, 2009 at 10:41 PM CEST #

JimYC said:

Hi there,

these new features are really great and rock. The bubble chart thingy will help people working with MS Office and Gnumeric guys a lot.

Anyways, my favoutite is the Chart Element Selector.

But I wonder if there are any performance improvements. OOo/Calc gives me hard times while working with "large" data sets (say 50 columns and 2000 lines). Though I still can work with OOo it's slow like a snail in comparison to EXCEL (sadly).

Thanks & kind regards
Jim

Posted by JimYC on October 07, 2009 at 01:13 AM CEST #

Ingrid Halama said:

Thanks for your comments! Regarding performance - some issues were addressed already, yes. See for example http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/chart_performance - but there were more. As the chart makes high usage of the drawing layer these components need to work both efficient and efficient together. There are already ideas to improve here further.

Posted by Ingrid Halama on October 07, 2009 at 10:49 AM CEST #

LCardoso said:

These are all great additions to Chart. I particularly like the "rotate data labels" feature. But I wonder if the new version of Chart allows more flexibility in the modification of error bars, as for example, changing the size of the horizontal line on the "T". Currently this is not possible, and it would be useful for technical/scientific graphs.

Posted by LCardoso on October 07, 2009 at 02:01 PM CEST #

Ingrid Halama said:

Changing the width of error bars was not requested so far. So I would like to invite you to submit an issue if you think that this feature is needed: http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/pre_submission.html. As there is still a very large amount of open requested features I can not promise that this particular one will be worked on soon. But if an issue exists the chances are higher that it gets fixed. A usage scenario that describes what the feature is useful for and why it is needed does help even more. In addition if an issue exist others can jump on, put their comments and ideas into it and vote on it. So again I would like to encourage you to submit an issue. Thanks for your feedback!

Posted by Ingrid Halama on October 07, 2009 at 02:26 PM CEST #

Pierre-André said:

Congratulations! The improvements you have done are really amazing. I am eager to test such new features especially the element selector. ;-)

Posted by Pierre-André on October 07, 2009 at 04:36 PM CEST #

Ingrid Halama said:

Thanks! But this is not the work of only a single person. Many people have worked on this in development, testing, writing automatic test, writing the documentation, writing specifications, doing the translations - well the latter is something that will actually happen somewhere in the very near future I guess. Within the translation I even do not know all the names of the people making things happen. This is a big team ;-). But I am happy to hear that you like the features :-).

Posted by Ingrid Halama on October 07, 2009 at 04:59 PM CEST #

Pierre-André said:

In fact by you, I was meaning the team (Björn, Niklas...) ;-)
The english has that particularity: "you" is used for singular an plural (I, you, she, we, you, they).
Take care

Posted by Pierre-André on October 07, 2009 at 05:10 PM CEST #

JimYC said:

Hi Ingrid,

I totally forgot that there was this performance blog entry some month ago. I think the issues described there address my "problem" to a large extend. I hope the next release proves to be faster for me (cross fingers).

Kind regards
Jim

Posted by JimYC on October 07, 2009 at 10:41 PM CEST #

Aye Lwin said:

Hi there,
this new chart features are really great and rock!!!

Posted by Aye Lwin on October 11, 2009 at 10:07 AM CEST #

Max Frosta said:

Are the new chart features 100% compliant with the ODF or are there some mysterious incompatible changes?
I can't see the "filled net chart" in the ODF 1.1 specifications. Does this mean Calc will not write 1.1 compliant files or does it default to the not yet standardized 1.2 specification proposals or even worse to something still under consideration?
If so, will there be/is there a explicit warning that the document will not be compatible and standard compliant?

Posted by Max Frosta on October 20, 2009 at 12:51 AM CEST #

Ingrid Halama said:

Nothing mysterious, you can find the filled net chart in the committee draft of ODF 1.2.
In OpenOffice.org the user can choose which version he wants to use for saving documents. This is nothing new and not Chart or Calc specific.

Posted by Ingrid Halama on October 20, 2009 at 11:01 AM CEST #