Specifying cells for error bars

[ousouji]

I'm not sure if there's already a thread about this. Howdy. I'm new and I use slack 10.

Anyway, I'm often presented with the issue of multiple data sets for y values, and a plot of their averages. Each individual point on the plot has a unique standard deviation based on these (original) multiple data sets. What I'd like to be able to do is specify a set of cells that contain the standard deviations, so that the error bars are specific to each data point. The stats tab includes the ability to add error bars, but these seem to only be customizable to a fixed variance for all the plot points. Otherwise it calculates standard deviations based on an average of all the plot points, which is counterintuitive to what I usually want to do.

I'm not sure if I can do this or not. I know this is doable in excel so half the time I have to resort to some windows machine somewhere, which I really don't like doing because it means I have to leave my comfy swivel chair.

Again sorry if there's already a thread about this and if someone could point me to it, that would rock.

Thanks.

((Oh and as an irrelevant plus, the math writer is sooooo awesome. A billion times faster than the clunky point-click-point-click of msword's formula editor.))

[gerwulf]

That's exactly what I am looking for, too. My girlfriend is using OO for writing the thesis of her doctorate, but she has to switch to MS-Excel for this exact functionality.

Since I'm already able to set a fixed or percent value for the standard deviation (using 1.9.104beta), I think it would be fairly easy to implement the option of specifying a certain cell thats holding the intended value.
On the other hand, I'm only a very noobie-coder of sorts, so my judgement may be misleading me.

Anyways, it would be really great to get this feature into what's going to be OO 2.0

Gerwulf

Hail to all those great people that make things like OO possible! Praise to you!

[joerg04]

Here and in the links (of this link) you will find everthing I hope.

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=19890&highlight=

I guess gnumeric is the fast solution for you.
_________________
joerg04

RKWard: http://rkward.sourceforge.net/
sidux: http://sidux.com/index.html
Musix: http://musix.org.ar/en/index.html

[David]

[9point9]

[quote="David"]

[David]

[quote="9point9"]

[9point9]

[gerwulf]

Thanks everyone for your replies.

I am and have been aware of R/gnuplot/gnumeric and the like, and personally have used/would use them again, even if that meant some additional hassles with installing/getting everything to work as it should.

On the other hand, most people (like my girlfriend) are quite unwilling to learn handling yet another software, and don't even mention finding/installing/configuring it.

For those people (the vast majority of today's PC users) it's often just a simple decision:
Use OO plus R/gnuplot/gnumeric, including install/configuration/learning to use them, or just stay/switch back to MS-Excel, which can do just what they want without any changes.
Correct, Excel may not be able to do any other things better than OO, but that would still be sufficient to drive 'normal' users back to Excel if he/she is missing this exact functionality.

All I'm saying is that if OO wants to get really widespread, I think it has no choice but to be able to do everything Excel can, and then some. Agreed, not everything Excel can do is worth imitating, but useful options (like this one) really are, IMHO.

Btw: is there any central or better suited place where I could bring this 'feature request' to the attention of the coders involved in Calc (without embarassing them), or is this already the best place to do so?

And 9point9: is there a place where I can find the macro you mentioned?

[ftack]

I agree fully with your concerns. It is also known and recognised that the charting in OOo is not up to current standards. There have been serious efforts to have an entirely rewritten charting engine ready for OOo 2, but they have not been able to make it. In the future, we surely will see a significantly improved charting, but obviousy, that does not help todays needs.

To actively contributue in filling "issues" (bugs, enhancement requests, etc), you just need to register on the official OOo web page, www.openoffice.org. First read a bit the recommendations before starting to submit issues. The issue you mention here surely has been filed. Once you are a registered user, you can "vote" for it to help saying that this issue is particularly important to you.

[gerwulf]

Thanks for the directions, ftack.

I registered and found that the issue 3380 describes what we are talking about here: http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3380

To everyone else here who would like this to be implemented soon: register on www.openoffice.org, use the 'My Pages' link in the top bar, then the 'Find issue' link at the left, enter '3380' in the 'Jump to issue' field.
Then, you can use the 'Vote for this issue' link further down on the page displaying issue 3380, and cast votes for it. Up to two votes are possible for a single issue in this module.

Cheers,

Gerwulf

[DocHusten]

Hello,

I am a scientist and I am using OpenOffice/Staroffice since more then ten years. In this time I tried to convince StarDivision (the former company who produced StarCalc) to implement this function several times. Therefore I am dissapointed about this topic, because this function is essential for every data plot.
I am using an other programm (I know this is not the solution): qtiplot (http://soft.proindependent.com/qtiplot.html). This software is availbe for Linux (also rpms for Suse, Mandriva...) and Windows.

Greetings

Michael

[duff]

use qtiplot... it does custom error bars (eg sem) easily. simply paste relevant values into a column in the qtiplot spreadsheet and select that column as the source of your error bars. oh and if you do download a binary from the homepage please donate a little to the project.

duff

[DocHusten]

Hello,

I am using qtiplot (and I made a donation to Ian). Despite that point, I wish this essential feature for OpenOffice. qtiplot has some problems when I have more than one y value corresponding to one x value.

Grettings

Michael