[plug] Openoffice chart production

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all,

I have just spent a very frustrating hour with openoffice trying to get 
it to produce a half decent chart from a simple csv file.

I ended up copying the file and using <ack> excel to produce the chart 
and print it in less than 2 minutes.

simple file of
01/01/02,0.2345

Date,figure

Easy you say.
This file has about 600 entries for every date from 01/01/02 to now.

Excel produced a lovely line chart, with easy to read column and row 
labeling. The column labels were spaced nicely and it only did one label 
per month so the bottom of the chart was not too cluttered.

The Openoffice chart tried to jam every single date onto the bottom of 
the chart, took nearly 30 seconds to regenerate any time I moved it and 
was impossible to print. The font sizes on the labels were stupidly 
large and because of this they all overlapped.

Now I know printing anything other than a standard portrait a4 page 
under Openoffice is difficult but I felt like throwing my hands up in 
rage this time.

I did not matter what I selected as my page format under the print 
dialog and page setup menus, it always gave me a4 portrait.

My printer here is a canon gp160, which is hp compatible. So I have a gs 
filter set up to be able to print to it. I even modified the gs filter 
to try and give me an a3 print but do you think I could get the bloody 
thing to work!

In the end, I copied the file to a windows box and did it on there. 2 
Minutes later I had what I was after.

<fume>

Brad

_______________________________________________
plug mailing list
plug at plug.linux.org.au
http://mail.plug.linux.org.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/plug