depthq - ccm|mac

With the recent financial crisis, I have been paying more attention to the exchange rate between the Chinese yuan, the US Dollar, Euros and the Malaysian Ringgit (RM). I have been fond of graphing stuff so that I can see a better picture of things. I found some historical data at oanda.com and tried my hand at visualising the data.

For anyone who's interested, you can download the OpenOffice Spreadsheet document that I used to generate the graph.

Looking at the data, it seems the exchange rate of the USD hasn't drop as much as the Euro and the Ringgit. Darn it, US products (Apple hardware, hint hint) ain't that cheap yet!

I initially used my freshly download OpenOffice 3 for the Mac OSX and it was pretty easy to use and very quickly I got the results that I wanted. But it was hard to compare the rates between CNY-Euro, CNY-RM and CNY-USD. So I tried to normalise the changes over the average exchange rate in that period and it looked slightly better and easier to understand.

I also tried it with Google Docs, but I used only the normalized data and I very quickly got something that I could share and publish, but the disadvantage of Google Docs is that it has very limited capabilities (e.g. can't change the minimum value for the Y scale). The one thing that I like is that I can share the Google Docs spreadsheet easily and quickly.

Finally I tried Numbers and it was dog slow. I couldn't do much with it and I gave up pretty quickly. It even crashed on me once!

Its just 3 columns of 291 rows each: How hard is it to handle that? In comparison to video editing, this should be peanuts!!

I think Numbers will need to go a long way, in terms of optimizing its performance, to fight with M$ Excel or even OpenOffice Spreadsheet. Maybe I am using a pathetic version, who knows. Numbers' graphs do look much nicer in general but if its too slow then I can't even get to it in the first place. Actually it doesn't look as nice is there are lots of data points, maybe I need to configure it somewhere, if I can get to it in the first place... its hanging, not sure what its doing... sigh...