Saving as a Template

Having spent all that time getting your chart to look right, you obviously want to keep the ‘look and feel’ ready to be used to plot a new set of data in the same style in the future. Firstly, let’s make some notes about the chart, and give it a sensible name – click on the chart definition and press Alt+Enter or hit the ‘Properties’ button on the toolbar:

Now, select ‘File, Save as Template’ or press the ‘to Template’ tool which will prompt you for a filename. Templates are saved in your GraPL\Template folder (you can change this with the Properties settings if you need to) as simple text files so that you can safely Email them without upsetting virus checkers and other security settings on your network. You can even edit them with Notepad if you want to do a little extra customisation! Having selected a filename, you will need to select a suitable icon for your template, and give it a brief description:

It will now be added to the selection of templates shown in the ‘Templates’ tab. You can remove a template by selecting it and hitting the ‘Delete’ tool (or selecting Edit,Delete chart) and change the description or icon by selecting it and choosing ‘Properties’ from the toolbar or right-mouse menu. Obviously, you can use the normal Windows Explorer capabilities to move templates around, copy them to a safe place, and so on. Just hit F5 to refresh the templates panel if you have made changes in this way.

Basing a new chart on your template

As a final stage, let’s start a new project and use our template to block out a similar style of graphic. Here is some completely invented data, plotted using our ‘Guardian’ template:

What I did here was created the data-sheet, then dragged my template over the chart definition. You can look around the example above and see what I have changed – other than setting the data series back to ‘1998,1999’ (templates always revert to the placeholder {data} series) and altering the headings, the only real change was moving the key around until it looked right. As you can guess, this is a lot faster than setting up an entire chart from the beginning every time.

Summary

That is the end of the first tutorial. Maybe you now know enough to get some useful work done, but if you want to know more about GraPL there are three more tutorials to go. Take a break first, though!