Generating Pie Charts and Bar Graphs (beginner)

[L_Seneca]

Hello,

I am having trouble making generating pie charts and bar graphs for a very simple expense ledger I'm using.

The columns of the ledger are: date, description, category, cost. Everything is sorted by date and items are added on an ongoing basis.

What I'd like to do is make a weekly pie chart showing expenses by category. When I just highlight the category & cost columns and create a pie chart, it ends up creating a separate slice for each individual expense entry rather than adding it up by category so that there is just one slice for all Apple expenses, one for all Banana expenses, and one for all Coconut expenses. So how do I create a pie chart that sums up expenses by each category and then generates a pie chart with just one slice per expense category, rather than one slice per individual expense?

I also want to generate bar graphs comparing total expenses across weeks, so I can compare total expenses in week 1 to total expenses in week 2 to total expenses in week 3 etc.

Finally, I'd like to generate bar graphs that compare total expenses in a particular category across weeks, so I can compare Banana expenses in week 1 to Banana expenses in week 2 to Banana expenses in week 3 etc.

I'm using version 3.3.0 on Vista. I realize that's probably not up-to-date but the computer that I use is not internet connected and the internet here (developing country) is so slow that I can't really feasibly download updates anyways.

I greatly appreciate any help. I am a real beginner to OpenOffice and spreadsheet software generally.

[RPG]

Hello

I understand you make a long list with data. It seems me a good starting point.

The next step is leaning what you can do with a pivot table in combination with the list. When you understand the pivot table then the next step is use the data from the pivot table for the graphs.

Pivot table
In the help file is a good description of the pivot-table. It did me help to start with a small table. I mean small with not so much rows and columns.

The dates can be used for organized the data. Place the cursor on a date field in the pivot table and do then
menu --> Data --> group and out line --> Group

The pivot table is real flexible. You can modify the layout of the pivot-table in edit mode but also with dragging the buttons.

Romke

[L_Seneca]

Last night when playing with it I tried a Pivot Table (On my version of OpenOffice its not called a pivot table... can't remember what its called... and the offline help file seemed sparse to me)

When I created the Pivot Table all I could get was a little menu wherein I could select e.g. "apples" and see the total apple expenses.

[RPG]

Hello

The old name for pivot table is: data Pilot.

When you have used the subtotals or consolidation then I think it is not the good tool.

Do test first with a little table. Learn what fields you have to drag in on which place in edit mode. In the beginning it is difficult to understand what the pivot table is doing.

Romke

[FJCC]

Here is a file with a couple of versions of Pivot Tables (Data Pilots). Right click inside the table and select Edit Layout to see how I set it up. Be sure to look in the More category. In the first table, I selected a cell in the Date column and used the menu Data -> Group and Outline -> Group to display aggregate data for each week.

[jrkrideau]

Hello,

I am having trouble making generating pie charts and bar graphs for a very simple expense ledger I'm using.

Just as an aside, pie charts are a really terrible way to display data especially if you have more than three categories[1]. I'd stick with something like a bar chart for all the data.


1. There are various complicated perceptual reasons for this but essentially it is hard to interpret the pie slices in terms of values.