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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For example the common entry "Object Properties" has been replaced by something more descriptive.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

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Posted by Ingrid Halama on 06 Oct 2009  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[12]

Friday, 15 May 2009
Chart performance
Ingrid Halama

Recently I did some performance measurements on charts. I used a big line chart with 13 series each with 4000 data points. The whole cycle of editing was measured:

load the ods document (bright green)
enter the charts edit mode per double click (orange)
change the chart (red)
leave the edit mode (dark green)
and save the ods document (yellow).

The whole cycle needs about 4 minutes. Where does the time go?

Look at the chart on the right side, where some of the more expensive calls are identified. It turns out that there are some superfluous calls that consume away the users time without justification! They are marked with a fat black border.

The first is Issue 101925. A metafile replacement image is requested during edit mode. This is not necessary as the chart uses the SdrView for rendering while in edit mode.

The second problem identified is Issue 101928. Painting was actually performed twice instead of once - both while entering the edit mode and also after changing the chart.

Eliminating those calls did speed up a single chart change within edit mode from 1:50 min to 0:19 min, that is round about 5 to 6 times faster now with this big document! :-)

As OLE objects are rendered via a replacement image while not in edit mode now the expensive creation of the replacement image  needs to happen at the end of editing. So leaving the edit mode takes longer now. But in sum we have saved time. Even more if one takes into acount that usually more than one change is performed when editing a document. You will not need multiples of 1:50 min anymore but only multiples of 19 seconds instead.

superfluous calls

Look at the chart below how the times of the different steps compare between OOo 3.0, dev300m47 and a changed dev300m47 including experimental fixes for the above identified issues:

preformance comparison with OOo 3.0

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Posted by Ingrid Halama on 15 May 2009  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[3]

Monday, 16 Feb 2009
Finally: Anti Aliasing is done for OOo 3.1!
Armin Le Grand
A short overview about Anti-Aliasing in OOo 3.1 and related features. It demonstrates the obvious, but also sheds some light on related things which may be not so self-evident on the first thought.
[Read More]

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Posted by Armin Le Grand on 16 Feb 2009  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[37]

Friday, 30 Jan 2009
New Chart features in OpenOffice.org 3.1
Ingrid Halama

Interested in the new Chart features that will be available in OOo 3.1? Have a look:


Flexible positioning of axes and axis labels

The axis line and axis labels can now be positioned more flexible. You can find the settings on a new tab page 'Positioning' in the properties dialog of the axis.

As shown in the example you now can have the axes crossing in the middle separating the coordinate system into the four quadrants, as many people are used to from school.

This issue was the most voted feature request recently within the chart with something around 80 votes.

Positioning of Axes


Plotting of missing values

Did you ever had spreadsheet data where some values were missing?

You now can decide how those missing values should be plotted: leave a gap, assume zero instead or simply continue the line (issue 65549).

Plotting of missing values

Right to left Charts & Bi-directional writing

For OpenOffice.org 3.1 Charts have been prepared to work proper in a right to left environment. So now when your Office runs in RTL mode new Charts are created in right to left layout.

If you want to do some fine tuning you can change all the involved options of course especially you now can decide explicitly about the writing direction of the various text elements inside a chart (issue 14365). Do not forget to enable enhanced language support for complex text layout, to show the additional setttings.

Bi-directional writing







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Posted by Ingrid Halama on 30 Jan 2009  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[9]

Wednesday, 19 Mar 2008
Error Bars from Cell Ranges in OOo 3.0
Bjoern Milcke

Did you ever want to take the values for error bars in a chart from cells in a spreadsheet? Then you are maybe one of those who voted for Issue 366. As you can see by the issue number this is quite an old one. And it has over 130 votes. So, if you are interested in this feature, there are good news: it is implemented, integrated into the DEV300 code-base and thus will make it into OpenOffice.org 3.0!

It was done in the CWS chart20, which was integrated into DEV300.m2 (as chart20_DEV300). So, if you know how to do a build yourself, you can do this for this master workspace or a newer one. I suppose, there will soon be DEV300 developer snapshot builds available on the OpenOffice.org Download Website.

Here is an example for a chart that has error bars at its data points which use their values from spreadsheet data. In this example both, the positive and negative values share the same range of cells, so they have the same extent in both directions. Of course these ranges can be different as well.

Measurement 

 
In addition to this long awaited feature, the automatically calculated error-bars now also support standard error (also known as standard deviation of the mean). So now, there are the error types:

Technically, it would be no problem to have separate parameters for positive and negative values for percentage values and error margins as well, but the ODF file format currently does not allow this.

While implementing this new feature, the dialog for error bar properties had to be adapted. In that course, it was also improved in general. You might have noticed that in OpenOffice.org 2.3 there is one dialog/tab page for statistic properties that contains error bars as well as regression curves (now called trend lines). This dialog was split up into two dialogs for the trendline equation feature. The trendline part was already improved there. Now, the second part was done by cleaning up the error bar dialog. This is how it looks now:

error range dialog

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Posted by Bjoern Milcke on 19 Mar 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[5]

Wednesday, 30 Jan 2008
New Chart features in OpenOffice.org 2.4
Bjoern Milcke

In the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.4 release there will be some nice new features in the Chart. And here they are in an overview. You can get more detail on the Wiki page about Chart Features for OOo 2.4. Thanks to Tony Galmiche there are nice screen shots of the new features together with the corresponding dialogs to access them.

If you want to try out the new stuff you can download a pre-release version. See this announcement for more information about the latest developer snapshot.


Equation and Value of R² for Trend Lines

Now, it is possible to display the equation for a trend line (regression curve) next to it. The formula object can be moved around, formatted with a number format, font and graphical formatting.

Alternatively, or in addition, the correlation coefficient R² can be displayed in the formula object.

This has already been announced on GullFOSS.

Wiki

 Trend Line Equations


Reverse Axes

Axes can be reversed, i.e. they point in a different than usual direction. In the example the y-axis points down from the top, instead of the usual orientation.

You can also reverse the category labels of a category axis.

Wiki

 Reverse Axes

Display Bars on Different Axes next to Each Other

You can attach some bars of bar or column chart to the first axis, and some to the second one. As a result the bars are grouped for each axis and displayed one group before the other.

Now, it is possible to arrange the bars side-by-side even when they are attached to different axes.

In the example, the blue series is attached to the left axis, while the orange and red series are attached to the right axis.

Wiki

 Bars of Different Axes Side By Side

 

Number Format for Data Labels

You can set individual number formats for the value displayed in a data label, as well as for the percentage. (Wiki)

Display both, the Value and the Percentage

It is now also possible to display the value and the percentage at the same time. You can choose a separator like a comma, semicolon, space or newline. (Wiki)

 Number Format and Combination of Data Labels
 

Flexible Placement of Data Labels

Data Labels can now be positioned at different anchor points of the data point objects.

In the example you can see that in a bar chart there are the absolute positions above, below and center. In addition, it is also possible to set a position depending on the sign of the value. So, outside means below for negative values, and above for positive ones.

Wiki

 Data Label Positions
 

Best Fit Data Label Positioning for Pie Charts

In addition to the before-mentioned positions for data labels, there is a best-fit algorithm for pie charts that tries to place labels without overlapping. Especially for smaller segments overlapping happens quite frequently, which can now be avoided.

Wiki

Best Fit for Pie Labels 

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Posted by Bjoern Milcke on 30 Jan 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[8]

Friday, 12 Oct 2007
More Than Just a Check-Box
Bjoern Milcke

Issue 7998 is quite old, as you can see by the low number. It was submitted half a decade ago. It's issue: equations for trend-lines. This is one of the issues that haven't been done for quite a long time due to the re-implementation of the chart. Now, that we have the new chart in OpenOffice.org 2.3, I took care of it and finished almost by now. The UI is still not optimal. As we have a nice code-base now, the implementation was for sure much more fun than it would have been for the old implementation, but it was far more than a check-box (that's what was stated at one point in the comments of issue 7998) — I can tell you that much!

Example Chart with Regression Equations
This is an example using the new feature. I chose only linear regressions in this example, but of course this feature works for all supported regression types. I was looking for some data that can nicely be used for regression curves, and found some here. And only after I created the chart I noticed that the new feature is really useful, you can see:

So, whenever chart17 is integrated, this feature will make it into OpenOffice.org.

What you can do now is, insert an equation for each regression curve (that's how trend-lines are still called in OOo). You can display the equation itself, the square of the correlation coefficient R, or both together. The text can be formatted with borders, a fill style and different fonts and font effects. The number format for all numbers appearing in the formula or in R² can be set. The equations are initially placed on the left and aligned with the top of the bounding box of the curve, which is not the most sophisticated place, but you will usually move the formula around anyway to have it at a place where it is well visible.

The necessary file format extensions for this feature have been integrated into the ODF 1.2 draft by the OASIS OpenDocument TC.

P.S.: For those who are wondering about the smooth rendering: this is a screen shot of an exported PDF.

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Posted by Bjoern Milcke on 12 Oct 2007  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[4]

Monday, 03 Sep 2007
Little Green Gems - OpenOffice.org Mail Traffic
Matthias Mueller-Prove

During my expedition through the community jungle of OOo I found a little green gem:

traffic for dev@dba.openoffice.org

It is a statistic on the mail traffic for the database project. Frank told me that the charts are provided by the newsgroup service gmane.org.

What can be better than one gem? 55 mail aliases have been registered at gmane.org. The charts are available at Posting Rates for OOo Mailing Lists on gmane.org.

cheers,
Matthias

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Posted by Matthias Mueller-Prove on 03 Sep 2007  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this

Monday, 27 Aug 2007
OpenOffice.org Projects by Members
Matthias Mueller-Prove

As you all know, OOo's community is divided into several projects. I did a little exercise and compiled a list with all projects by number of members (ODF). I found 115 projects! Among them are 77 language orientated projects with 1 to 1005 members. Can you guess the largest language community for OOo?

And now the fun part: The data can also be visualized as a treemap. Click the image for an interactive Java version at IBM's Many Eyes service.

treemap of openoffice.org's projects

cheers,
Matthias

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Posted by Matthias Mueller-Prove on 27 Aug 2007  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[9]

Chart Wiki-Pages
Bjoern Milcke

In the OpenOffice.org Wiki there is a page about the Chart. It became more and more a mixture of miscellany. So, I decided to clean up this mess a bit. The page now contains four major sections:

The main focus of these pages is on development. So, the section Development should be the one to grow most. I hope you find this page clear and useful. Any suggestions for improvement of this page are welcome.

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Posted by Bjoern Milcke on 27 Aug 2007  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[1]

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