Episode: 1905
Title: HPR1905: 66 - LibreOffice Impress - Built-In Charts
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1905/hpr1905.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:00:53

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This is HPR episode 1905 entitled 66 Libra Office Impress built in charts and is part of the series Libra Office.
It is hosted by a huker and is about 14 minutes long.
The summary is creating charts from inside impress.
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Hello, this is Huker, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode in our ongoing series on Libra Office Impress.
In this particular episode, I want to talk about creating charts directly, what I'm calling built-in charts in impress.
In the last tutorial, we looked at OLE objects and we saw the charts could be brought in to impress from Calc via OLE object linking and embedding.
But you can't create the charts directly in impress.
Bear in mind that due to the modular nature of Libra Office, you will be using all of the same tools as Calc uses.
Libra Office developers never reinvent the wheel if they can avoid it.
There's a lot to know about charts if you're going to use them effectively.
And I covered a lot of that in our Calc tutorials.
There's going to be links in the show notes, but we had one episode called introduction to charts and graphs,
another one on creating charts and another one more on chart editing.
And those tutorials cover some very interesting points in some depth.
And since I have the information there, I'm not going to really go that in depth here.
If it's something you need to know more about, I would say go back and listen to those.
So this tutorial, I'm just going to focus on what the things you need to know to do this stuff inside of impress.
Now, as we saw earlier, the default new slide has four sections in the middle for inserting objects.
And it's divided into four quadrants.
The first one says insert table, second one, insert chart, third, insert image, fourth, insert movie.
Now, we've covered images and movies, and we did a little bit of charts in our discussion of OLE linking from Calc.
But now let's look at creating a chart directly on a new slide.
We can do it using the button on a new slide, which will work fine, but has limitations.
For instance, what if we wanted to put in some text?
If we add text, the button for inserting a chart goes away.
And if we start with a chart, the auto layout box for text goes away.
And sometimes we want to put a chart into a slide that is already in the deck and thus has no button available.
This means we need to have two ways to insert a chart. We can, first of all, do it from that button on a new slide.
Find if that works for you.
But the other thing is you can go to the insert menu and select chart.
Now, either option will work exactly the same way.
And what will happen, either way, is that a sample column chart will be created and placed on your slide.
That may not be the type of chart you want. It definitely won't have your data.
But it's a starting point. And then through editing, we're going to make it work the way we want.
So, first of all, chart type.
Column charts are only one of the types of chart available to you.
If that's what you wanted, you don't need to change anything, but you have other options.
To make a change, first make sure you have selected the chart.
You know you have done this when there is a gray box around the chart and you see the eight handles
on the sides and corners of the box.
Now, when you've done so, you'll see that the usual impressed toolbars have gone away.
And now you're seeing toolbars and icons appropriate to the chart editing.
We talked a little bit about this last time in OLE when we had a spreadsheet object selected.
And all of a sudden we had spreadsheet things available.
Here, it's going to be chart things.
Now, to see what each icon is, just mouse over it and a pop-up will tell you the name.
Look for the one that says chart type.
Click on it and you'll get a window pop-up that gives you a number of options.
And what they are, it's column bar pi area line xy parentheses scatter bubble net stock
and finally column and line.
Well, not surprisingly, these are exactly the same options as in Calc.
And of course, it is the Calc module that's being called here.
So that's exactly what you should expect.
And since I discussed when to use each of these in the Calc tutorials,
I'll refer you there for any additional discussion.
Just choose the type you need for your chart and click OK.
Next, once you have your chart type selected, you need to enter the appropriate data in place
of the sample dummy data that is there now.
With the chart selected as above, in other words,
gray border around it in the eight handles, look for the icon for the chart data table and click on it.
This will bring up a window where you can enter your data.
And you know, it's going to look kind of sort of like a spreadsheet.
Now, here you can put in appropriate labels for your data.
So in I did an example that's on my website and so I left it as a column chart.
And when I did that, I saw the column icon appearing next to the column names.
I can click and change each of them.
So right now they say column one, column two, column three.
So I went in and I made it Android, iOS, and Windows.
Then for each row, I can change the row labels from row one, row two, and so on.
So I changed it to North America, South America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
And as I make these edits, I can see the chart on my slide updating with the new data.
Next, I need to put in my numbers and to get something meaningful to look at, I made up some
numbers that are kind of sort of plausible for market share of each mobile operating system in
each region. And that gave me an interesting bar graph column graph, really. It's looking pretty good.
Then I looked and I said, ah, I left out Africa. What am I going to do? It's a big continent.
Well, it's not a problem because there are editing buttons on top of the chart data table.
The editing buttons are from left to right, insert row, insert series, which is a column in this
particular case, insert a text column, delete a row, delete a series, move a series right,
or move a row down. Now, on my column chart, the rows are the groups along the horizontal axis,
which represent the regions. And the series are the different mobile OSs for which I put in data.
So if I wanted to add Africa, I would just click insert row and fill it in with my data.
Simple as that. Now, with the chart selected, take a look at the menu bar.
While it looks familiar, it is not the impress menu bar at all. Since Libra Office knows you're
working on a chart, it hasn't replaced the impress menu options with chart options. You can see
this very clearly when you go to the insert menu. Here you will find only options that are relevant
to working on a chart. And these options are titles, legend, axes, grids, data labels, trend lines,
mean value lines, x error bars, and y error bars. Now, any option that does not make sense will
be grayed out. In my case with a column chart, the trend lines option was grayed out because
that would really would not make sense for this type of chart. So anyway, I can add a few elements
from here, like a title. If I select titles, a window opens up where I can put in the titles I want to
use. By the way, it also lets me label my axes. Two things at once. Useful. So I typed in
a title, a subtitle, and an x and a y axis label. Of course, you might insert one of these things
and then change your mind. All you need to do is click on it on the chart and hit the delete key
and it will go away. Now, editing chart elements. We have in several places previously discuss the
object-oriented approach in LibreOffice that objects contain other objects, have inheritance,
and so on. For instance, in LibreOffice Calc, the object model, and using templates,
we went into it a little bit and we mentioned it in a few other places. Now, as regards chart
editing, each of these elements is an object in itself and can be independently edited.
Right-click on the object and you should get a context-sensitive menu of options.
The first option is Format, and it will say Format Title, or Format Legend, or Format Axis,
and so on depending on which object you have chosen. The Format selection will open a screen with
plenty of options. The first one is Borders. This will let you put a border around the object and
control the style of that border, such as a continuous line, a dotted line, and so on. The color of
the border, the width, the transparency of the border. Then area, this lets you fill in the object
background with a color, gradient, hatching, or you could use one of a number of built-in bitmaps.
Transparency. This affects the background of the object and may be used, for instance, to mix a
background color with that of the containing object. You could have, and we'll talk about this,
one color as a background for the entire chart, and then selected a white, for instance, as a
background for the title, and then set the transparency and what that would do, it says you had a 50%
transparency, is it would let about half of that color bleed through. That's an interesting
approach. You can use that. Then, there's the usual font effects and alignment, and alignment
also includes rotation. So, for instance, you may want to have your text go vertically instead of
horizontally, particularly for a axis label for the y-axis. That's a good example of where you'd
want to do that. Then, the second option, position and size, lets you fine-tune these options on
the chart. Then, there are options to revisit your chart type and data table. You can do that
just as well from the buttons above, and finally, you have the cut, copy, and paste options.
Now, the two last editing options I want to mention are the chart area and the chart wall.
Each one is a background, but they're separate. When you select the chart and have a border around
it, and the eight handles visible, you are enclosing the chart area. It contains a bunch of other
objects, such as titles, legends, axis labels, and the chart itself in the middle. With the principle
of object inheritance, you should expect that formatting options supplied to the chart as a whole
will affect each of these objects, and this is a good place to illustrate how this works.
Right-click on a blank space within the overall chart, but not over any of the objects contained
in it, and you should see an option called format chart area. Go to the second tab, area, and select
a color. You will see that the entire chart now has that color as a background, including all of
the objects inside of it. That's how object inheritance works. But objects need not inherit if you
give them their own properties. To see how this works, right-click on the title, go to the area tab,
and select a different color for the title. You will now see the title selection has overwritten
the chart area selection, and if you go to the transparency tab for the title,
make it give it a certain amount of transparency, you'll essentially get a mix of the two colors.
In the main part of the chart, if you right-click, you'll get the option to format the chart wall.
All right, and instead of the entire chart being-instead of the entire chart being selected,
it's just the main chart itself in the middle, and you can see that that's the only thing that's
selected, and so you can give it a different background, or again, you could use transparency to
mix it with the chart area color, however you want to do it. So, that concludes the discussion
of adding a chart directly to an impressed slide. And next, we are going to look at tables.
So, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and reminding you as always to support
free software. Bye-bye.
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