"Chart creation is a wee bit convoluted, depending on
how you start it. If you have a range of cells selected, then
selecting Chart|Create will immediately slap up an XY chart, which
can be moved and resized around the sheet with ease. Of course,
this is all well and good unless you wanted another kind of chart.
In this case, or if you don't have a range selected, you will have
to use the Chart|Create menu commands and then Chart|Change Chart
to pick a range and/or chart type. You can select from XY, pie, and
bar charts, using a dialog box that is very reminiscent of Excel's
chart tool. Again, this quirk is not a deal-breaker, just a little
quirk that you will have to adapt to.
Speaking of Excel, abs does provide a certain kind of
compatibility with Excel, using a unique tool patterned directly
after Visual Basic: the ABVisual scripting language.
Bertin's approach to sharing Excel and abs files is rather
interesting. The contents of every abs file, he explained, is an
ABVisual script that is faithfully recreated by abs when the
spreadsheet file is opened in abs."
