The error bar function on the chart feature is not well implemented at present.
 It is an important function for use in science and business and so is in my
opinion worth developing.  At present the error bars follow a similar structure
to MS Excel (Although it should be noted that excel imported charts do not
display error bars correctly). 

The way they work at present is actually quite useless: you can select standard
deviations etc. but the error bars display a standard deviation of the plotted
bar values (ie. if you have 3 bars of values 3, 5 and 7, the error bars will be
the standard deviation of these three values and will be the same for each bar).
 What is actually needed is a standard deviation (or better a 95% confidence
interval) of the values which are averaged to get the value of each bar in the
first place.  The error bars should be of different sizes on each of the bars
depending on the SD of the data for which the value of the bar is the mean.

This will require (at least) two extra features: firstly to be able to plot the
mean of values as one point in a chart (rather than just having to work out the
mean and then plotting that), and secondly to allow different error bar sizes
depending on the SD of the data from which the mean was obtained.

If this feature was implemented it would put the chart function of open office
head and shoulders above Excel. Excel does allow you to specify different error
bar sizes for each data point but you have to work out the SD (or SEM) within
the spreadsheet and then point to these values from the error bar section. Being
able to select SD, Standard Error of Mean or 95% confidence interval directly
from the chart section would be a vast improvement (look at something like
sigmaplot for the way it should be done).

Regards

James Stone