OpenOffice Charts

Open Office Charts are a useful way of displaying data visually from a spreadsheet.

The Open Office spreadsheet program is called Calc and has a chart function that can be found under the Insert menu item.

Select the range of data that is required for the chart, either as columns or ranges within columns. Go to Insert...Chart... and the chart creation dialogue box will open (see below).

Listed here are the chart types available, with their sub-types, such as Column, Bar, Pie, Area, Line, X-Y, Bubble, Net, Stock and Column & Line.

Clicking the various types of chart will show a preview in the box above. Data ranges and data series can be adjusted here, and further chart elements added. Click finish once the chart is complete to insert it into the document. The chart can then be moved around the spreadsheet. Click delete to remove the chart. If an error occurs when trying to delete the chart, then simply click elsewhere in the sheet to deselect the chart, then select it again and press delete.

OpenOffice Charts

The charting features in Open Office are not quite as good as other spreadsheet applications, such as Excel, but they are more than capable for most tasks.