[libreoffice-users] what's the best way to make charts of spreadsheet data

I just made a chart of some data in LibreOffice Calc and was
disappointed both by the process (very slow) and by the results
(apparent lack of ability to modify the view).

I've used spreadsheets and LO Calc specifically sporadically over the
years to make calculations but wouldn't call myself an expert. I can't
remember the last time I tried to make a chart.

So I'm wondering if I've missed something in LO that would help me have
a better experience with this chart, or if there are better tools to
use to draw charts from spreadsheet data.

I'm running Version 6.1.3.2 of LibreOffice (actually the openSUSE
build for Leap 15.0). I'm running a machine with an i5-4460 CPU @
3.20GHz and 8 GB main memory. It's normally fast enough for whatever I
want to do.

My spreadsheet data is in columns. Column A is the dates and column B
is the times. Then ten columns of humidity data and eleven columns of
temperature data. There are currently just over 5000 rows of samples.

Making the chart was extremely slow. Every time I changed the Name of a
line of the chart I had to wait whilst it cycled through several steps
to make the change. Initially when I removed some empty columns from
the data range, it took an age to do so. etc.

Now I've created the chart and got some reasonable lines across it, but
what I hope are the dates and times along the X axis are just a mess and
I've no idea how to make them display usefully.

The Y-axis is reasonable from 0 to 120, although it would be nice to
trim the blank space at the top a bit, since the data can't exceed 100.

I haven't found any way to select individual points on the chart to
display the detailed value of that point or all the values at that
time. Nor do I see a way to temporarily hide individual data lines to
more clearly see other particular lines, for example.

If there's any way to do these things with an LO chart, and to speed it
up, I'd be grateful for any pointers. Or if there are better options
out there that can read .ods or .csv and display charts, that would also
be interesting.

TIA, Dave

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