Google spreadsheet annoyance

[undyingking]

It seems to be impossible to build a selection from a non-contiguous block, eg. I want to make a chart from the data that would in Excel be a1:a6,c1:c6, but Google just interprets that as a1:c6. Which is a bit of a pain. Surely that's not too abstruse a requirement? I can understand them not letting me build a non-contiguous selection by using ctrl-click as in Excel, but not to be able even to type one seems a bit harsh.

I would like to be able to use Google Docs generally for more stuff, but it often seems that once you get beyond the very simplest of operations, it's still somewhat lacking.

[Poll #1674584]

Comments

[rotwang.livejournal.com]

Try Lotus Symphony 3?

[gbsteve.livejournal.com]

No problem doing this in Excel but I've not used Google Docs.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Other: I think this is a reasonable thing to want to do with a spreadsheet and it's reasonable to want to use spreadsheets but I'm not convinced that advanced functions in general are within the remit of Google Docs.

I know some tech commentators like to talk in terms of Google vs Microsoft, but from my perspective there's little crossover between the typical usage scenarios of Docs and Office. I like Docs because it means I never have to use Office, but that says more about me as a user than it does about Office.

As I see it, Office occupies that awkward space between professional tools (Adobe, Quark etc.) and lightweight apps. But if you happen to want to do moderately complex things without investing too much money it can be the right call. (Although then you get to have a separate bunfight about whether StarOffice or OpenOffice have replaced MS Office...)

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

Yuck, charts?

I've been using Excel for...um...about half my life. I still have to figure out charts from scratch every time I want them, because it happens so rarely ;)

I think I'd just tend to either rearrange my data so the bits I wanted WERE contiguous - or if that was inconvenient because of other requirements on the data, have a separate worksheet of source data for that chart, which was pulling the relevant data from my master sheet - but that makes my databasey brain cry because of unnecessary repetition of data.

I think you /may/ be able to cheat by just selecting the whole block A1:C6 and then not making any use of the data in 'B'...but it's been such a long time since I've played with charts that I could be going mad ;)