Looking for a graphics / charting application

[timswim78]

I'm currently using MS Office and have run into some limitations, as far as the customization of charts. I'm a research analyst, and I am beginning to expand beyond technical papers to working on reports for the public, meaning that the graphics and charts must be pretty.

Work is getting Adobe CS3 for me, and Illustrator looks like it has some good charting features. However, it looks like it can take a fair amount of time to assemble a simple chart.

Are there any other charting applications that I should look at? Is Harvard Graphics any good? We're putting in our budget requests soon.

 

[esun]

If you're willing to learn something new (i.e. not a simple point-and-click interface), consider using Asymptote in combination with LaTeX. Graphs and charts turn out great, and the customizability is extremely powerful (since it's based on a general purpose vector graphics language).

Here's their website: http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/

Here are examples of what it can do (it also has 3D capabilities if you're interested): http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/gallery/2D%20graphs/

Oh, and it's completely free, too.

 

[homercles337]

I wonder if esun even read the OP?

For charts/graphs you should stick with vector based, and it looks like that is what you are doing--good. For all my graphics i use matlab then usually print to eps and manipulate in Illustrator. Any simple graphing application that can output to a vector based format should do fine since you can really change everything you need to in Illustrator. If youre familiar with Excel and want something like it that does more stats/math and better graphics look into SigmaPlot. I havent used it in years, but in grad school it was pretty useful until i migrated everything to the Matlab/Illustrator combo.

 

[esun]

Did you read my post homercles? I was originally going to recommend MATLAB, but the OP wanted something that could make graphs pretty, and Asymptote is great at that (better than MATLAB). Just because you haven't used it doesn't mean it isn't relevant to the OP.

 

[timswim78]

So, it sounds like Illustrator is the way to go? I'm definitely more interested in a GUI app than I am interested in learning to program.