Wednesday, August 26, 2009

OpenOffice

Following EnoughWealth's suggestion I downloaded OpenOffice. Well, at least it lets me manipulate the shape of the charts in my old Excel files. If you doubleclick on the chart it pops up and the spreadsheet pattern behind it disappears. I could manipulate some but not all of the features of these old charts. Printing to a pdf also resulted in nice images. There are some gains over Excel 2008 but looks like more losses, so I won't be switching, though I really didn't spend much time looking at it. As soon as I found something I couldn't do that I wanted to do, I stopped.

1 comment:

enoughwealth@yahoo.com said...

One plus is that OpenOffice is free ;)

I use excel for all my personal finance and business graphs these days, but I find it generally pretty limited.

Back in the days when I was an experimental scientist, I used SimgaPlot - it's industrial strenght graphing and statistial analysis. It supposedly can link seamlessly to excel spreadsheets (although I doubt that means displaying your existing graphs automatically) and would probably be worth migrating future work towards this stat and graphing package. Anyhow, give it a play:

http://www.hearne.com.au/products/sigmaplot/edition/10/