Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 82036
Charts are woefully inadequate
Last modified: 2013-02-24 21:18:53 UTC
I realize that it is generally bad form to post general rants to bug trackers, but it's been a long time that I've been waiting for this to improve, and it simply hasn't happened. Charts in openoffice Calc are simply dreadful, and they seriously cripple my ability to use the application. Charts are probably one of THE most useful things a spreadsheet application can produce, indispensable for people working in science (at the least) and probably most other technical professions as well. Your charts are abysmal. The level of customization allowed is miniscule; as a simple illustration, I am unable to even specify the scale and formatting of axes in all chart types. I cannot export charts to other formats. Even if I could, I'm not sure I would want to - the rendering is frankly ugly. They are also poorly-designed - charts which I can easily render on competing products (e.g. gnumeric) will cause openoffice to bind and crash. In version 2.3 you finally gave some attention to these deficits, giving me some hope that you were finally making some needed improvements. But, alas, I find they are still inadequate. Your input mechanisms are confusingly labeled and do not include basic conventions that every other spreadsheet application's charts allow (e.g. selecting ranges with the mouse). I find this simply intolerable. Please, please, do your users a favor and devote some real energy to fixing these glaring failures. In the meanwhile, I'll continue to rely on other applications for my spreadsheet needs. Yours truly, Saurabh Asthana
wrong component and IMHO in most of the points not true. Also no arguments are given how to make it better or at least what exactly is wrong in your opinion. Frank
As you already noted yourself, this issue is not a valid issue. There are mailing list where you can post your concerns. Telling people that their product is bad does not help. It never has. If you have concrete suggestions about what to improve, you can write enhancement issues for that when you made sure they don't already exist. * charts can be copied via clipboard and pasted as bitmap or metfile. When being pasted into Draw they can be exported in various formats. * Ranges can be chosen with the mouse. Due to technical reasons you have to press the button next to the range field before selection. * For antialiasing and improved rendering there exist issues. They do not only apply to charts. * You can scale all continuous axes. Scaling of categories is not yet possible, but will probably be in the future.
closed as invalid