how do you draw figures

[Henry Hartley]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 11:48 AM Dan wrote:
>> I would look into gnuplot as suggested by others, but openoffice
>> calc can do it as well, the interface is very similar to excel.

The graphing in OpenOffice has been good enough for me, as well.  Of
course, I'm not doing anything particularly sophisticated.

While OpenOffice in general has made great strides and I have no copies
of any Microsoft Office software at home (for a few years now), I
personally find OOCalc to be a little annoying in certain respects.
Possibly I've just become too used to the Excel way of doing things.  On
the other hand, there are a few things that have been consistent in all
the spreadsheets I've used from SuperCalc, 1-2-3, Quattro, and Excel
that I think are pretty well established and shouldn't be "improved"
upon.

Probably the most annoying thing for me is the whole cut and paste
thing.  For instance, you want to copy a bunch of cells, let's say A5
through A25 into column B.  So, you put the pointer on A5.
[Shift][Ctrl][Down Arrow] selects the column of cells.  Now, you hit
[Ctrl][c] and the [right arrow] to move to column B.  But you are now in
row 25 and have to move up manually to row 5.  Also, you have to do a
[Ctrl][v] to paste them, while every other spreadsheet on the planet
lets you do this whole operation with a [Ctrl][c], [right arrow], and
[Enter].  Is it a show stopper?  Well, of course not.  Still.  It's
annoying.

Actually, there something that SuperCalc did, way back in the early
1980s that I wish someone would reintroduce to spreadsheets.  The
assumption seems to be that everyone works from top to bottom in
spreadsheets.  If you type something and hit the [Enter] key, the
pointer moves down a row.  Why?  In SuperCalc, once you established a
direction with the arrow keys, the enter key would keep moving you in
that direction.  So, you type something and hit the right arrow.  Then
you fill in the next cell and when you hit [enter] the pointer moves to
the right.  It keeps doing that until you establish a new direction.
Yes, the pointer sometimes moved in the wrong direction but not three
quarters of the time.  Just a personal wish.  

And yes, I know this isn't really the forum for OpenOffice feature
requests.  Just letting of some minor steam.

-- 
Henry