[macsailor]

When I try to paste the data from Numbers into OmniGraphSketcher. Sometimes it works great and other times (from different spreadsheets) it doesn’t work at all.

Tried the instructions at the website, but no change in the result.

OmniGraphSketcher will import directly from any other application (such as a spreadsheet or text editor). Just copy and paste the data right into the graph window.

Specifically, tab- or comma-separated values are imported as follows:

1 column of numbers: 1-dimensional data (series plot).
1 column of labels, 1 of numbers: axis tick mark labels with 1-D data (series plot).
2 columns of numbers: 2-dimensional data (scatter plot).
1 column of labels, 2 of numbers: 2-D data (scatter plot) with a label for each data point.
More than two columns of numbers: 2-D data, with the first column repeated as a pair with each other column.

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by macsailor

When I try to paste the data from Numbers into OmniGraphSketcher. Sometimes it works great and other times (from different spreadsheets) it doesn’t work at all.

Tried the instructions at the website, but no change in the result.

How about some examples?

[macsailor]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

How about some examples?

I tried to paste this information into OGS and the only data that managed to be shown, was some of the dates, not the numbers of the population:

1800-12-31 3*962
1810-12-31 5*796
1820-12-31 6*723
1830-12-31 8*665
1840-12-31 10*203

etc

But after I unchecked the »Thousands Separator» within Numbers, the OGS managed to get the figures right. If I tried to copy and paste with the »Thousands Separator» checked, the OGS did not recognise the numbers of the population at all. I do not know if it’s a bug within Numbers or within OGS though.

1800-12-31 3962
1810-12-31 5796
1820-12-31 6723
1830-12-31 8665
1840-12-31 10203

[whpalmer4]

I trust I correctly surmise that 3*962 in your post is supposed to represent three thousand nine hundred sixty-two with my choice of separator? Or is that how Numbers spit it out on the clipboard? If the latter, I'm not too surprised that it didn't end well :confused:

For what it is worth, not having a copy of Numbers, I pasted your table into Appleworks (stripping out the '*' characters) and was able to copy and paste the resulting table into OGS without any trouble, regardless of whether or not Appleworks was showing a separator for the thousands. Ditto for Excel, and also just a plain tab-separated text table. What happens if you paste that table from Numbers into a different spreadsheet?

[drdrang@gmail.com]

Recognize also that OmniGraphSketcher doesn't understand dates. If you look in the Data pane of the Inspection panel, you'll see that the dates are turned into a simple increasing series: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Because the particular set of dates you had was already evenly spaced, you didn't experience this problem.

[macsailor]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

I trust I correctly surmise that 3*962 in your post is supposed to represent three thousand nine hundred sixty-two with my choice of separator? Or is that how Numbers spit it out on the clipboard? If the latter, I'm not too surprised that it didn't end well :confused:

For what it is worth, not having a copy of Numbers, I pasted your table into Appleworks (stripping out the '*' characters) and was able to copy and paste the resulting table into OGS without any trouble, regardless of whether or not Appleworks was showing a separator for the thousands. Ditto for Excel, and also just a plain tab-separated text table. What happens if you paste that table from Numbers into a different spreadsheet?

It supposed to represent 3962, but if I have the »Thousands Separator» within Numbers checked, the OGS won't recognise the numbers right, but will instead interpret it as 3*962. I do not know if the fault is to be blamed on OGS or on Numbers.

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by macsailor

It supposed to represent 3962, but if I have the »Thousands Separator» within Numbers checked, the OGS won't recognise the numbers right, but will instead interpret it as 3*962. I do not know if the fault is to be blamed on OGS or on Numbers.

I'd say Numbers, based on what we've seen so far, unless someone can point me at a widely adopted standard that puts asterisk characters ('*') in numbers as separators, or an app that would accept them without error.

If you copy that table from Numbers and paste it into TextEdit, do those funny separators appear?

In my opinion, reasonable arguments could be made for either copying numbers to the clipboard without separators (what Appleworks appears to do, and surely the most conservative approach), or with separators if present in the source (what Excel appears to do), but if the separators are inserted in the clipboard version, they ought to be in a format that other applications will understand, in accordance with Postel's Law.

[peterk]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

How about some examples?

The following rather innocent-looking data when pasted as plain text, or from Numbers 09, just make a text box rather than the graph.

R E
0.6 -1.10689248
0.7 -1.12692469
0.8 -1.12700072
0.9 -1.11639130
1.0 -1.10015376
1.1 -1.08117078
1.2 -1.06111200

As this was the first dataset that I reached for when trying to see whether this program could be useful to me, I come away somewhat underwhelmed!

Build details:

Product: OmniGraphSketcher-1.1
Tag: OmniGraphSketcher/1.1/gm-v21
Date: 2009-12-14 11:03:08 -0800
Builder: robin
Host: tb105i.private.omnigroup.com
Revision: 123023

[whpalmer4]

I don't have Numbers, so I can't try that case out, but if you are copy/pasting from a text file, the numbers should be either separated by commas or tabs. Copying directly from your post gets a text label, as expected (no tabs), and copying to TextEdit and putting in tabs before moving on to OGS gets a graph, also as expected.

[dave_m]

Originally Posted by peterk

The following rather innocent-looking data when pasted as plain text, or from Numbers 09, just make a text box rather than the graph.

R E
0.6 -1.10689248
0.7 -1.12692469
0.8 -1.12700072
0.9 -1.11639130
1.0 -1.10015376
1.1 -1.08117078
1.2 -1.06111200

Sorry for the trouble, Peter!

Bill is right - plain text columns must be separated by tabs or commas in order for OmniGraphSketcher to interpret them correctly. As for importing from Numbers, I created a simple spreadsheet (in Numbers '09) using the above values and also didn't have any trouble pasting into OGS. I've attached the file (saved in Numbers '08 format just in case) - perhaps you can see if there's any differences between yours and mine.