Libre Office Calc Graph
Eddie Listner
Graphs in general are a wonderful way to display data. They can help us to quickly analyse patterns and to understand our numbers at a glance. Even better than having good results is displaying them nicely!
libre office calc graph
As we saw before, Libreoffice Calc is a common free alternative for Microsoft Excel, and a good way to start working on our data. It differs very little from Excel, so you should feel at home after a few minutes. To start our tutorial, let us use a small dataset and generate a simple scatter plot with connected lines, as seen below.
As on Excel, you can start adjusting your plot directly on Libreoffice. However, if we want to take it one step further, we can really obtain any aspect we could imagine. For this, neither Excel nor Calc would suffice, as we would always be constrained by their editing capabilities. But we can easily export our plots to Inkscape, and unleash all the potential of vector editing!
We may now change the properties of each line independently. Select the two lines of the graph and set the width to 4px, then enable the rounded cap and set opacity to 80%. Opacity is a nice trick to make the intersection of the lines appear more natural, as seen below. Repeat the same procedure for the lines on the legend, and move them under the plot.
Make copies of the circle and center it on every node of the two lines (This should be quick with a copy/paste approach. Note that the object is pasted where the cursor is currently pointing). As the circle object is partially transparent, the result will be slightly blue or orange, depending on the line.
Our graph already looks much cleaner and modern! You can also follow the instructions from our last Inkscape tutorial to add some annotation to key points on the graph. The final result should look similar to the one below:
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