Re: KChart mature? Expectations must be low....follow-up
Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 75.36.168.234]
on October 12, 2008 03:03 AM
No offense was meant to the K* developers. Though I'm not a prof. programmer, I have an appreciation of the complexity and effort for a project of this scale. KSpread, etc. has great potential, it just isn't as complete as many alternatives yet. Perhaps KChart is configured simply by design, but it leaves KSpread missing a lot. After reading the author's impression that KChart was mature, I felt compelled to offer an alternative view based on a comparison of KSpread capabilities that are reliant on KChart function. I'm sure the developers already know what features are not available in KSpread (via KChart) that are in most of the alternative spreadsheets. I agree, MS Excel shouldn't be used as a benchmark, since it's graphic support isn't what it should be either (I've complained to MS about that, even though it would fall on deaf ears - market forces ~don't exist, and most of the competition has followed rather than lead dev there, barring a few). Nonetheless, since many of the functions I'd want are in Excel, QuattroPro, OO Calc, and Gnumeric, it doesn't seem they are too outside the mainstream. It would be most helpful to provide specific constructive feedback to the development teams, and I have on some forums. I'll make an effort to further this pursuit.
The specific example I gave was a simple line or scatter plot requiring a continuous-value X-axis, which was missing when last I checked. That's commonly needed to graph many relationships. Any student (Jr. High and up) needs to do that sort of thing for math (algebra, trig, etc.) and science classes. Many business users probably do so, and certainly engineering and science professions rely on that heavily. While script-based options like GNUplot do give great output, they are certainly not for the mainstream. Spreadsheets are used like screw-drivers - for many things beyond their original function - but calculation and graphing are closely aligned with their main usage. The vast majority of users would go to a spreadsheet first if they needed to perform some calculations with some numbers and graph some results. Think back to any science lab report or math when graphing a function. I hope this is helpful.
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Re: KChart mature? Expectations must be low....follow-up
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 75.36.168.234] on October 12, 2008 03:03 AMThe specific example I gave was a simple line or scatter plot requiring a continuous-value X-axis, which was missing when last I checked. That's commonly needed to graph many relationships. Any student (Jr. High and up) needs to do that sort of thing for math (algebra, trig, etc.) and science classes. Many business users probably do so, and certainly engineering and science professions rely on that heavily. While script-based options like GNUplot do give great output, they are certainly not for the mainstream. Spreadsheets are used like screw-drivers - for many things beyond their original function - but calculation and graphing are closely aligned with their main usage. The vast majority of users would go to a spreadsheet first if they needed to perform some calculations with some numbers and graph some results. Think back to any science lab report or math when graphing a function. I hope this is helpful.
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