![]() Click on a bar in a bar chart, for example, and you’ll see a five-tabbed screen, letting you control everything from the general style to the appearance of trends and error bars. The context-sensitive Inspector panel makes it easy to control the look of every last item on your chart. The chart viewer window includes tools for annotating charts, making it simple to add text, geometric shapes, and speech bubbles to your chart. There’s even a useful data filler panel that makes it simple to populate days, weeks, months, or any set of values you wish. In Chartsmith, the data viewer window makes it easy to switch between various chart types, add and delete rows, and reorder columns-once you read the manual to realize you have to hold down the Control key in order to drag and drop the columns. I found customizing and modifying charts to be much simpler in Chartsmith than it is in Excel-I can usually make Excel do what I want, but I often struggle to get things exactly as I want them. The chart window (background), data viewer window, and inspector are the three main windows in Chartsmith. Want to change one bar of a three-bar chart to line? One click of a button in the data viewer window, and that task is done. Creating a chart is as simple as adding rows and columns in the data viewer, entering your data, and choosing a chart type. The chart viewer window shows real-time changes as you make edits in the data viewer window, and you can change text (but not values) directly on the charts, if you prefer. The aforementioned two windows contain the chart viewer (which holds the charts) and the data viewer (for entering/editing data), and the inspector is used to customize every element of your charts. Once I learned the interface, though, Chartsmith was relatively easy to use. Using Chartsmith is unlike using a spreadsheet to create charts. (Thankfully, the app itself doesn’t share the appearance of the tutorial’s screenshots.) The whole thing just feels somewhat dated and dusty, though everything works. Remember Aqua’s stripes and bright blue 3D-esque tab buttons? You’ll find them alive and well in the screenshots in the tutorials. The flashback extends to the tutorials, too. Chartsmith’s online help provides more detail, but finding the answer to a specific question using Apple’s Help Viewer seems to take forever.Although everything works, there is a learning curve, and there’s this general feeling that the interface is out of date. Three tutorial documents do a good job of introducing the program’s features, but they’re no substitute for an indexed guide. Part of the frustration I felt when dealing with Chartsmith’s interface was caused by the program’s lack of a reference manual. I also encountered sporadic screen-refresh problems while I was resizing text, and the program occasionally truncated the text labels at the tops of the bars in one of my charts. Unlike other chart components, which display handles when you click on them, the chart background doesn’t give you any visual feedback to let you know when you’ve selected it. ![]() ![]() But to hide or reveal the chart’s legend or grid, you have to select options in the Data Viewer window there are no corresponding controls in any of the Inspector windows. For example, to set attributes for most chart elements, you first select the component with the mouse and then click on an icon to reveal an Inspector window (see “Inspector Gadgets”). If the file contains multiple charts, each one becomes a separate slide, and you can even choose which Keynote theme to use for the presentation.Ĭhartsmith’s chart-editing interface suffers from a few annoying inconsistencies. In addition to letting you export individual charts in several graphic formats, Chartsmith lets you save an entire document as an Apple Keynote presentation (mmh April 2003). Chartsmith also lets you drag entire charts into the document windows of other running applications - including Microsoft PowerPoint - in PDF or TIFF format. If you press the option key while you’re dragging the swatch, you can preview the effect before you commit. For example, you can drag a swatch from Chartsmith’s color palette onto any chart element to alter the element’s hue. Chartsmith’s interface relies extensively on dragging and dropping.
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