Comments on: better charts than Excel?

Question: better charts than Excel?

scarabic — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 17:16:58 -0800

Free Windows chart-making software that works with simple tab-separated data files and beats Excel's charts for options, esthetics, and readability?

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 17:43:34 -0800

Probably marginally helpful and not quite what you're looking for, I guess, but who knows: but there was once a product from Metacreations (the folks who did those wacky-interface things like Kai's Power Tools and such) called Office Advantage. It may even have been free, because I remember using it for a long time, back in 2000ish. It was a plugin for Excel and Powerpoint, and man, it let you do some great things with graphs (amongst other aesthetic stuff). It was bought by some other company when Metacreations died, and has since been taken off the market, I think.

Worth a play if you can still find a copy.

By: scarabic

scarabic — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:20:21 -0800

Ooh yeah baby. That's what I'm talking about.

Can't seem to find a current version, though.

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:24:34 -0800

Email me at my user name at gmail.com, scarabic, if you come up empty.

By: ROU_Xenophobe

ROU_Xenophobe — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:47:06 -0800

They're firmly in the camp of simple-but-clear instead of glitzy-from-many-angles, but gnuplot and R will both generate basically publication-quality graphs. Both are command-line driven and not terribly user friendly. gnuplot just does graphs, R is a complete statistical package. Both are free.

By: singingfish

singingfish — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 03:16:20 -0800

R is easier to use than Gnuplot in my opinion. Still quite a learning curve to start with though. Any library book on S (the statistical programming language - been around for ever) is good for R as well by the way.

By: jduckles

jduckles — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 06:03:19 -0800

I second gnuplot, not incredibly easy to use at first, but once you get the hang of it you have a high degree of control over what the final output will look like.

By: bonehead

bonehead — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 07:21:56 -0800

R does produce nice graphs indeed. I've had no trouble getting them published. Learning R just for graphing may be a bit much though. R is a stat/math language (a free implementation of s-lang), similar in complexity to say, Ruby or Perl.

We use SigmaPlot for most of our publications though. While a bit of a bear to use, it produces the most excellent results.