What's the best charting software out there?

May 7, 2011 9:03 AM

Best business charting software?

A very similar question was asked in 2007.

But most of the answers said: Software X produces great charts, but you still need to load the image later into Photoshop or Illustrator to do the final touches. Particularly to fix the line widhts, the extra space that appears at the right of the chart, etc...

What I am looking for would be a software like Harvard Graphics (yeah, looong time ago), which you dont need to do any further tweaking. I have my data sets in mysql, so extra bonus points if there is an awesome charting tool for sql.

posted by theKik to computers & internet (3 answers total)

R makes great vector- and bitmap-formatted figures out of the box, with little post-render tweaking necessary. RMySQL interfaces with the database engine, so that you can import data into R.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:33 AM on May 7, 2011

If you decide to investigate R, once you have R installed, take a look at the ggplot2 and lattice graph libraries. These will make it easier to make high-quality figures from your data.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:38 AM on May 7, 2011

I have settled on Deltagraph for 90% of the business graphics that I do in my work, which is competitive analysis.

I do like R and have used (and recommend) JGR as a front end, but currently I am stymied when I want a second y-axis, which is a common need for me.

It may be important to you that R and JGR are free, if you did not already know.
posted by Glomar response at 11:03 AM on May 7, 2011