Episode: 1565
Title: HPR1565: 34 - LibreOffice Calc - More on Chart Editing
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1565/hpr1565.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:08:34

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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio,
and another in our exciting series on Libra Office, focusing for now on Calc, the spreadsheet program.
So, in this particular episode, we're going to continue on how to edit charts.
Now, last time we looked at creating a chart, so we've been through those things, but I suppose
you want to pretty it up, edit it, make some changes, what have you.
So, the options that you have here, and many respects similar what you had when you created
the chart. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with the chart that we created
last time, and you can download it from the site, from my website, and the link is in the show notes.
So, begin by clicking on the chart to select it.
Now, you know that you have done this when the eight handles appear. Those are the little squares
they appear on each corner, and in the middle of each side, and those are the things you use to
resize the object. So, when you see those appear, you know you've selected the object.
Then, right click and select edit, which is at the bottom of the pop-up menu.
When you do this, you will see a thick gray border around the chart, and your data series will be
highlighted. Now, you can right click again and get a menu of things you can do in the edit mode.
First, let's take a look at format chart area. This says three tabs.
The first border lets you put a border around your chart. The default is to have none, but you can add one.
If you do, you need to select a style, a color, and a thickness before anything appears.
If you want it to be somewhat less stark, you could add a little transparency to tone it down.
The next tab area lets you fill in the chart with a background color. The default is white,
but you can choose any other color, and again, you can reduce the color effect by adding transparency
on the third tab, and even a little gradient. Then, insert titles. We put in titles and labels for
our axes when the chart was created. Here, we can edit those, and we can add secondary access labels
if needed. This is useful for when you have two different series on one graph, and they have a
different range of numbers. Insert delete axes. This goes with the secondary axis labels.
If you want to add a secondary axis, you can do it here. Now, secondary axis is where you have
two different data series on the same graph, and the numbers are slightly different, so you have
an axis for each group of numbers. Next option, delete legend. This is a toggle, so we created a
graph with a legend, so the option is to delete it. If we delete it, the option changes to insert
legend. Chart type. This option allows you to change the type of the chart. Possibly, you select a
line graph without connecting the dots, or it should have been a scatter plot. What have you? You can
make these kinds of changes. Lastly, data ranges. Here, you can make changes to the data ranges,
and the data series you select. You can see you have some fairly broad capabilities to edit
your chart, but I think it helps to have some real examples. Let's do an example of a multiple
axis chart, and we're going to employ some of these techniques. Sometimes you want to put
several different series on a chart, and the ranges are significantly different. To see how this
works, let's use the editing option to go back to our line chart, and add the series for interest
earned. So, we right click on the chart, select edit, then right click again, and select data ranges.
Go to the data series tab, click add, and we get unnamed series with no definition.
This series has two items in the data ranges field on the right, name and why values.
Click on name, then go down and click the roll up button to the right of the range for the name
field, and click on the cell C1, which contains the column header interest earned.
You will see the field fill in with something like this definition, dollar sign, high return,
dollar sign, C dollar sign one. Then go back to the data ranges box above this and click on why values.
The field below will now change to read range for why values. As before, click the roll up button
on the right, then click and drag to select cells C2 through C41 to grab the actual values.
You should now see this second series on the chart, and an added legend for interest earned on the
graph. So far so good. Now, right click on the graph again, and this time select insert delete
axes. Add a secondary y-axis. When you do, it will simply be a mirror of the existing y-axis,
only it will be on the right instead of on the left. Now, select insert titles,
and add a secondary y-axis called interest earned. This will now appear on the right side of the graph.
But the dollars are still the same. To get the effect we want, we need to move our cursor over
the secondary y-axis to where the tool tips says secondary y-axis. Right click and select format
axis. This brings up a window with multiple tabs, and the first one is scale. That's what's
controlling the numbers here. If you look at it, you can see that the fields all have automatic
checked, but if you remove the check marks, you can enter the values you want for the secondary
axis. A minimum of zero still makes sense, so leave that alone. But for the maximum, I can look at
my numbers and see that by the end I get to just over 40,000, so to make room for all my numbers,
I'll make my maximum 50,000, because you don't want your scale to be smaller than the actual data
that you're measuring. For the major interval I selected 10,000, and for the minor interval 5,000.
So I now have a scale that makes sense, but my series is not lining up with it, so there is one
last step to take. While in edit mode, right click on the interest-earned series on the graph.
In the menu that pops up, select format data series, and then go to the options tab,
and set it to align date series to the secondary axis, and click OK.
You should now have a graph with two data series, each aligned to a different y-axis.
The two series happened to lie one on top of the other because of the way the series were created,
but if you wanted to make them more separate, just go back and format the secondary axis to make
the maximum something like 100,000 instead of 50,000. Now way back when we first started looking at
Libra Office, I mentioned the significance of objects, and pointed out that Libra Office is an
example of an object-oriented program. The significance of this is that a spreadsheet is an object,
and it contains individual sheets that are object, and each sheet contains other objects,
such as cells and graphs. And each graph is an object that contains further objects,
and each of these objects has its own properties. In fact, we used this insight in our multiple
axis example when we set properties for the secondary axis, and for the interest-earned series.
Pretty much every object has a properties menu that can be accessed by right-clicking on it.
The properties that you can set are ones appropriate to the object. If it is a piece of text,
you should see text properties, such as the font and the alignment. If it is a data series,
you get a different set of properties. Running through all of the options in detail would turn
this into a much larger and probably more tedious episode, so I'll just briefly hit the highlights.
Title, subtitle, access labels. If you right-click on these, you get the usual font options,
position, size, all of that kind of stuff. Axies, right-click, and you can select position,
labels, font effects, etc. Legends, right-click on these, and you can set fonts, border,
transparency, and position. The data series, right-click on these, in the graph itself,
and you can set the alignment, the color, the symbol, etc.
So the bottom line is that you can pretty much edit anything on a graph,
but sometimes you need to drill down to the specific object to do it.
So I have got an updated copy of the spreadsheet that we've used that is going to incorporate
the graph that we've created here as an example, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes
so that you can download it and take a look at it, and I understand that this can be a little
bit hard to follow, so maybe the thing to do is download the file that we started with,
try and follow along with what I'm talking about on your own copy of Libra Office, and then
at the end you can take a look at the final one that I did compared to the one that you did,
and perhaps you'll find that they're very similar.
And if they're not, maybe you'll learn something about why they're different.
So this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio, and as always reminding you
support FreeSoftware. Bye-bye.
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