I've got three minor irritations with Gnumeric:
- I originally thought that it was impossible to a point in a X-Y chart
series have a transparent fill. Then I found out that I can use the
'custom colour' chooser to turn the opacity down. However, I cannot save
this back to the colour selector, despite there being a row of colour
buttons at the bottom that are specifically for custom colours. Since
having a non-transparent fill for the 'cross', 'plus' and 'star' symbols
is completely pointless, this is a needless extra hassle to go through
for every single series I wish to use in this manner. Bug reported as
GNOME
bug 500113.
- Saving the chart as an SVG is great, but it doesn't remember where
you put the last file. I'm saving to a directory five levels in from the
root directory, and not underneath my home directory (the default 'save
to' location) and this is incredibly irritating to either retype the
path, select it from the directories, or copy and paste it from a previous
foray. Bug reported as
GNOME bug
500116.
- For X-Y charts, at least where the chart is a point-only chart, if
you have three columns selected, then Gnumeric assumes that the third
column is another X axis, not a second series to plot against the first
column (the original X axis). It should assume that the first column is
your X series data and the other columns are separate Y series data to
plot against it. In fact, it almost makes no sense whatsoever the way
it currently does it, because graphing two series against different X
axes is almost unheard of (it's far more usual to graph the same X series
data against two Y axes). Although I applaud them allowing you to easily
edit both the X and Y axis data sources and the title's data source, and
make the whole structure of the chart a logical tree structure that's
easy to navigate, it would be much easier if you there was an extra
control that you could use to simply choose one of the original input
series - like making each a drop-down box. Keeping the current control
to allow you to select a new range is important, however. Bug reported as
GNOME bug
500117.
On the plus side, Gnumeric's chart editing and SVG export are really
great. It's a worthy little spreadsheet in its own right. I especially
like its ability to use tab-completion and dropdown-prefill when selecting
a place to save (although this may be a feature of GNOME save dialogs in
general that I have not hitherto discovered). If only their
choices for the default series colours didn't suck.
