Initial commit: HPR Knowledge Base MCP Server
- MCP server with stdio transport for local use - Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series - 4,511 episodes with metadata and transcripts - Data loader with in-memory JSON storage 🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
204
hpr_transcripts/hpr1555.txt
Normal file
204
hpr_transcripts/hpr1555.txt
Normal file
@@ -0,0 +1,204 @@
|
||||
Episode: 1555
|
||||
Title: HPR1555: 33 - LibreOffice Calc - Creating Charts
|
||||
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1555/hpr1555.mp3
|
||||
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:03:58
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
.
|
||||
.
|
||||
.
|
||||
.
|
||||
.
|
||||
Hi, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
|
||||
in our ongoing series on Libra Office Calc.
|
||||
And what we're going to do today, we're going to follow up on our last tutorial or episode
|
||||
in whatever, where we talked about how to select the right kind of chart or graph.
|
||||
And now we're going to actually get into creating charts and graphs and see how that process
|
||||
works and how we can make something nice and clear.
|
||||
Now in Libra Office Calc, we can go to the insert menu and select chart to get started.
|
||||
Or there's generally a button for it on the standard toolbar.
|
||||
It can be a bit hard to make out, but it shows a pie chart in red with a percent sign
|
||||
in gray on top of it.
|
||||
If you move your cursor over it, the tool tip should say chart.
|
||||
Clicking this button opens the chart wizard.
|
||||
Now step one is to choose the chart type.
|
||||
These are the types we discussed in the previous tutorial, so you should be ready for this
|
||||
step.
|
||||
But you may notice that for each type, you also have several options.
|
||||
There are usually small variations on the main theme of that chart type.
|
||||
So for column, you can have a column chart with more than one variable.
|
||||
This is usually handled by having multiple columns identified by color for each bucket.
|
||||
As an example, suppose you wanted to compare religious preferences in three states.
|
||||
You could have a blue bar for Catholics, a red bar for Protestants, a yellow bar for Jews
|
||||
and a green bar for Muslims.
|
||||
For each state, you would have these four colored coated bars.
|
||||
That is your first option.
|
||||
Your second option is called stacked.
|
||||
In this case, the bars are placed one on top of the other.
|
||||
The height of the resulting bar would be different for each state, depending on how many
|
||||
people you counted.
|
||||
The third option is percent stacked, and in this case, the height of the bars is the
|
||||
same.
|
||||
It's always 100%, but the height of each section represents its percentage.
|
||||
Now for bar graphs, you've got the same options.
|
||||
For pie charts, your first option is normal, which is the usual pie chart.
|
||||
Second one is exploded, and all that does is separate the slices of the pie.
|
||||
It has no added significance and is purely an aesthetic choice.
|
||||
The third option, donut, allows you to display two variables on a single pie chart, and
|
||||
the fourth option is an exploded donut chart.
|
||||
So it combines the exploded feature with multiple variables.
|
||||
Area.
|
||||
The first option is several data series superimposed one on each other.
|
||||
The second option is to stack the data series, and the third is percent stacked.
|
||||
This works much the same as with column and bar charts, but is normally done with quantitative
|
||||
data.
|
||||
Option one is points only, which is kind of an odd choice for a line graph, but maybe
|
||||
you might want to do it.
|
||||
Option two is to display the points and the line connecting them.
|
||||
Option three is to display the line without the points, and then option four turns the
|
||||
line into a 3D surface.
|
||||
These differences have no significance for the actual data analysis of our purely choices
|
||||
of how the graph is to be displayed.
|
||||
The odd thing here is that you have options to connect the dots.
|
||||
The idea of a scatter plot is that you have no presumption of a relationship that would
|
||||
even make sense of connecting the dots, but the options are very similar to what you have
|
||||
for line graphs.
|
||||
Looking at some of these, and you can tell I'm sort of saying, boy, that sounds kind of
|
||||
stupid.
|
||||
Why did they do that?
|
||||
This is a good example of just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
|
||||
Some options just don't make a lot of sense most of the time.
|
||||
Now for the bubble chart that really only has one variation, makes it nice and simple
|
||||
for what they call the net, which I'm calling radar, because that really is a lot more common.
|
||||
Option one plots the points on each spoke.
|
||||
Option two has both points and the lines connecting them.
|
||||
Option three is the lines only.
|
||||
And option four fills in each irregular polygon with a color.
|
||||
I think option one is not a preferred choice here.
|
||||
One of the main virtues of this type of chart is seeing the polygon shape.
|
||||
Stock chart.
|
||||
Basically the choices here have to do with whether you draw in the columns or just let
|
||||
the points exist in space.
|
||||
And for column in line, you've got choices of having the columns side by side or stacked.
|
||||
So the chart type choice really comes down to a little thought about the clearest way
|
||||
to present your data.
|
||||
Nothing more deeply significant is really involved.
|
||||
Now, data range.
|
||||
This is where you need to specify the place where the data comes from.
|
||||
The data can be found on a specific sheet for starters.
|
||||
Your spreadsheet file can contain multiple sheets or pages within it.
|
||||
And if you're not clear on that, please go back and look a few episodes back where we
|
||||
talked about that.
|
||||
By default, they come labeled sheet one, sheet two, etc. but you can rename them to something
|
||||
meaningful.
|
||||
Note that when you open this up, it gives the range as being a sheet column row.
|
||||
What you need to do is click the button to the right of the data range, which will cause
|
||||
the chart wizard to roll up to a single bar.
|
||||
And using your cursor, click and drag to take in the whole range.
|
||||
And then click that button to the right of the rolled up bar, which will now read expand
|
||||
in the tool tip when you cursor over it.
|
||||
And this will bring back to your chart wizard with that range of data now filled into the
|
||||
data range field.
|
||||
You might notice that the addresses are all absolute cell references.
|
||||
In other words, they all have dollar signs.
|
||||
This is good.
|
||||
You don't want your references moving around when you're making a graph.
|
||||
The next choice is whether your data series are in columns or rows.
|
||||
This is the default, as this is most common, but you can flip it around if desired.
|
||||
Why are you being asked this?
|
||||
And why does it matter?
|
||||
Well, I will illustrate.
|
||||
And you're going to have to download and take a look at this to see what I'm talking
|
||||
about or check it out on the website, because I'm going to refer to some visuals here.
|
||||
But I did first a graph using our simple savings model.
|
||||
This is from a few episodes back.
|
||||
And if you have that spreadsheet saved, you can open it, select a range from the cell
|
||||
that says, year in the upper left, and drag that down into the right for the last cell
|
||||
of end amount.
|
||||
So you're going to be saving basically all of your data in this big rectangular area.
|
||||
And then if you have your data series in columns, you will have four lines on your graph,
|
||||
and they all make sense.
|
||||
Now, if we put the data series in columns, which is the norm, that's what we get, but suppose
|
||||
we put it in rows.
|
||||
Well, it would treat each row as its own series.
|
||||
The result is kind of weird.
|
||||
So you actually, in that case, you have like 40 different series that you're trying to
|
||||
do on one graph, and the numbers just don't make any sense at all.
|
||||
So now, the other thing in the data range selection, the section here, is to select the
|
||||
first row and or first column as being labels.
|
||||
Now, when you take a look at the graph, you can see that if you do this properly, this
|
||||
makes the graph very readable.
|
||||
Since the data series is in columns, each value in the first column becomes a value for
|
||||
the x-axis.
|
||||
Now, in ours, that was the, you know, which year of the savings period.
|
||||
And that makes sense.
|
||||
And in each label, in the first row, becomes a different line on the graph with its own
|
||||
symbol and legend.
|
||||
So you would see, beginning amount is one series, interest earned is another series, annual
|
||||
edition is a third series, and ending amount is a fourth series.
|
||||
Now, when you take a look at it, you know, annual edition would just be a horizontal straight
|
||||
line, of course, because it's just going to be a thousand each year, but the others
|
||||
will show an upward trend over time.
|
||||
Okay, now we go to data series, and here we can narrow down what we want to show in the
|
||||
graph.
|
||||
Now, in our savings model, we have four series, right?
|
||||
We've got the beginning amount, interest earned, annual edition, and ending amount.
|
||||
But we might want to, not want to display all four of those on one graph, suppose we
|
||||
only really wanted to show the ending amount on the line graph.
|
||||
Then we could select the other columns and click remove.
|
||||
If we later changed our minds and wanted to add back a column, for example, interest earned,
|
||||
we could come back here and click the add button.
|
||||
The other fields that, what Calc is picking up for the series name, it is reading each
|
||||
column name from the cell in row one, and it's getting its values for the x-axis.
|
||||
Here called categories, though that is more appropriate for bar graphs than for line graphs
|
||||
from the values in column A. You can manually change these, or click the button to the right
|
||||
of each field and use your mouse to click on what you want.
|
||||
Now, chart elements is the next, and on this tab you can add elements to the chart.
|
||||
First is a title.
|
||||
For our example, let's say it was savings over time.
|
||||
When you type this in, it will appear on the top of the chart and be centered.
|
||||
Then you can add a subtitle.
|
||||
In many cases, you won't want to do this, but the illustrate how it works will add a subtitle,
|
||||
a simple model.
|
||||
This will appear right under the title, but in a smaller font.
|
||||
We can then label each of our axes if that is not clear.
|
||||
For the x-axis, we could use years of saving.
|
||||
This will appear under the graph in even smaller type.
|
||||
For the y-axis, we will use dollars saved.
|
||||
This will appear in the same font as the x-axis label, but rotated to match the vertical
|
||||
axis.
|
||||
Legend matches up a symbol used for the data points to the name of the series.
|
||||
In the sample I created, for instance, I have a series of green triangles that represent
|
||||
ending them out.
|
||||
By default, this is placed on the right of the graph, but you could move it around.
|
||||
Finally, the grids create grid lines on the graph.
|
||||
If you select x-axis, you will get vertical grid lines, and y-axis gives you horizontal
|
||||
grid lines.
|
||||
Y-axis is the default, and it usually makes the most sense.
|
||||
Once you've made your choices, click finish.
|
||||
If you go to my website, you can see the pictures of these graphs, or the final graph is
|
||||
included in a revised version of the savings model spreadsheet, which I have put into the
|
||||
show notes linked that you can download that and take a look at it, or do your own and
|
||||
see if yours looks like what I did on my website.
|
||||
So I hope this is helpful.
|
||||
I know that when we get to visual stuff like charts and graphs, it could be a little
|
||||
hard to do that sometimes in an audio presentation.
|
||||
But I'm hoping this is of some use, and at least shows you how you can go through and
|
||||
make these kinds of choices, and then if you experiment with it in Libra Office, I
|
||||
think you'll get the idea very quickly.
|
||||
So this is Hookah, signing off, and reminding you as always, please support FreeSoftware.
|
||||
Bye-bye.
|
||||
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.
|
||||
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday and Monday through Friday.
|
||||
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by a HBR listener by yourself.
|
||||
If you ever consider recording a podcast, then visit our website to find out how easy
|
||||
it really is.
|
||||
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the Digital Dog Pound and the Infonomicom Computer
|
||||
Club.
|
||||
HBR is funded by the binary revolution at binref.com, all binref projects are crowd-sponsored
|
||||
by Lina Pages.
|
||||
From shared hosting to custom private clouds, go to LinaPages.com for all your hosting
|
||||
needs.
|
||||
On list otherwise stasis, today's show is released under a creative commons, attribution,
|
||||
share a like, free dose of license.
|
||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user