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

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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.
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