State of the Chart

I'm not sure what's worse when technology let's me down — the disappointment or the another-glimpse-of-beachball-and-I-smash-you-to-pieces frustration. It's probably a little of each.

I've just had such a painful experience. The task was simple: I needed some charts (or "graphs" as I'm sure we used to call them). Nothing too fancy, just two series of around 1,400 observations each, plotted against a third containing dates. How hard can that be for a dual 2GHz machine with 2Gb of RAM?

(You may have already guessed the answer.)

First up: Numbers. I bought iWork mainly for Pages, mainly because it always feels so damn fast when typing, which weirdly is the first thing I look for in a word processor. Numbers has until now been sat gathering dust in my Applications folder (apart from the odd occasion when it comes bouncing forward offering to handle a .xls file for me. I always politely decline). After today it's unlikely to see much more action. After producing the first chart I dragged it up the page. Cue five minutes of beach ball. Force Quit and next, please.

In case you're not familiar with NeoOffice, it's a version of the OpenOffice.org code made more Mac-like. It's been doing stirling work opening Office files for a few years now, and I've used it to produce charts many times in the past. Putting my silly dalliance with Pages behind me, it was back to good old dependable NeoOffice.

But only for a quarter of an hour or so. And if it hadn't taken so long to do anything it would have been a lot less. It took over ten second for the chart to first appear, and the same length of time after each alteration. And there weren't many of them, since selecting the correct part of the chart (axis labels but not axis line; legend but not just the surrounding box) was a black art I obviously need far more practice to master.

Finally, I turned to the genuine(-ish) article, OpenOffice.org (yes, the .org appears to be a required part of its name). I'd move from it to NeoOffice a while ago, mainly because, yes, NeoOffice really is more Mac-like. OpenOffice.org requires X11 to run — of course, being a proper geek I had this already installed. After the slowest 185Mb download I've experienced in a long while it was one drag-to-Applications and we were away.

OpenOffice.org behaves like its *nix equivalent, in-window tool bar and all, but that is only a small inconvenience. (I also have a bit of a soft-spot for ugly X11 GUIs — I think it's a nostalgia thing.) The app made short work of producing the four charts I needed: they appeared almost instantly and were equally quick to update. This was helped by the simple black-on-white colour scheme they used by default — NeoOffice seems to take the "being like MicroSoft Office" thing to the extent of copying their fugly grey-background pre-set — meaning there was less in need of tinkering. There was a small hiccup when I couldn't copy and paste them into Pages, but exporting the destination document soon took care of that.

So a couple of short hours later I have my four charts and my heart rate has returned to its overweight normal. I blame Java for NeoOffice's failings, but despite today's little setback I'm going to keep it as my free Office-like suite of choice.