The title of this entry probably seems a mite specific, but I had a devil of a time tracking down the technique in my original Google searching and thought I would share it here for posterity. Basically, all I wanted to do was create a simple chart in NeoOffice, using two non-adjacent columns of a spreadsheet. The columns were in one sheet (”Data”), the chart in another sheet (”Chart”, appropriately enough).

In a barebones setup, you might have column A “Date” and column B “Mileage”. Selecting the desired data range for, say, a month’s worth of cycling mileage might look like

$Data.$A$1:$B$31

during the chart creation. Name of source sheet ($Data), then first cell ($A$1), then last cell ($B$31), which describes a tall rectangle of date/mileage number pairs in the Data sheet.

No worries. In my case, however, I had a few other columns of data and wanted to create a chart with the non-adjacent column A “Date” and column G “Cals” (a calculated guesstimate of calories burned during each ride). Here’s how it works:

$Data.$A$1:$A$31;$Data.$G$1:$G$31

Source sheet of first column ($Data), beginning cell ($A$1), and end cell ($A$31). A semi-colon, then the range of the second column using the same format as the first.

Perhaps a Microsoft Office user can confirm this would work in that suite as well?