In business spreadsheets I like to incorporate small, simple charts to quickly convey trends. Although the basic graph templates in Excel are very ‘cluttered’, you can improve them dramatically with some simple modifications.

I was curious whether Calc had the same problems as Excel, of whether it’s graph functionality was better.

Unfortunately I find that Calc is worse than Excel in this field. To demonstrate I created a simple chart in both Calc (left) and Excel (right) and compared them:

1. the graph-line in Calc is — in my opinion — less ’smooth’
2. on the x-axis every data-point gets its own ‘dash’ in Calc. I can’t find an option to change this
3. I can’t find a way to exactly align a graph to a cell corner. In Excel you can press <alt> while repositioning or resizing a graph and it will align perfectly to the cell. This is particularly important when you want to use multiple graphs, neatly aligned.
4. Although not part of these spreadsheets, I heavily use dynamic ranges to ‘automatically update’ graph data. I briefly tried this out in Calc, but so far I can’t get it to work.
5. I find selecting and changing parts of graphs less intuitive than in Excel. Admittedly, this might be a result of my lack of experience with Calc.

Maybe I need to work a bit more with graphs in Calc, but so far I find that Calc is less versatile than Excel.

Sample spreadsheets
simple graph.ods
simple graph.xls