other than just to draw a rectangle, or obviously to house an array; does anyone know what 'graphs' can be used for???

like, why is there an option in the menu to make a 'graph', when all it does is put a rectangle on the screen. Is there some secret i have missed in all these years?

Haha, I've always wondered the same

also, even more bizarrely... when i right click on a newly created graph, why does the 'table' help file come up? An empty graph doesn't even contain a table!

In Pd-extended 0.43.1 the canvas help file comes up, which has a link to the graph helpfile.

At any rate, I have no idea why the option is there, but it might just be because they are technically two different things. A Put menu array by default creates both an array and a graph to put it in. But you can also select "Last Graph" in the dialog, and it will just create a new array and put it in the most recently created graph (along with any other arrays that are in there). So you can create a new array without creating a graph.

But I don't know why you would do it the other way around. The only use I can think of is if you want to dynamically patch in a bunch of arrays into a single graph, and you just want to make sure the graph is created first. But since they can only be made through the Put menu, I doubt that's the reason.