Working with charts as with gnuplot

Hi all!

I had this idea while working with Calc. As I mentionned in an older post, where I work, we produce a lot of charts. And that always ends up as hours of copy & paste/click to change the source or title or axis or whatever/endless work.

First thing I tried is to work with macros, but the thing is, it’s not very practical.

The second one that came to my mind is that it would be great to be able to work with charts just as with plain text. Say for example you want to change the axis range for many charts, you would just create a search & replace pattern with a key like x_axis_range and move it to whatever you like. Or say that I’m copying a sheet, and just changing a few values, I know that the error bars references still refer to the old page. I could just do a search & replace to fix it everywhere instead of doing it by hand.

To summarize, I would see it something like right-click on a chart => get chart attributes, edit & save.

Any idea if that would be feasible?

Thanks!
Laurent

Similar to my question? Set default formatting for Calc charts

@filo – It looks like part of what you want is a programmatic interface for manipulating the features/layout of the charts. Have you tried saving files as flat-ODF, manipulating the XML, then opening them again?

Hey,

No luck with that idea, although it’s still my ideal!
What I came up with is more work with the macros. It’s possible to do regexp on the titles for example if you need to change them in batch. Same with the data sources. However, for example, if you need to change the data sources for error bars, you’re in badluck, after hours of digging, I couldn’t find a way to change it.

If anybody has ideas about this last point, I’d be glad to hear it!

Any luck with that? I need exactly the same thing!