what other charting software exists?

[Jamie M.]

I am frustrated with Excel's limited charting ability. To produce many
effects, you must fragment your data and trick Excel with it, and to my mind
this makes the data table confusing to anyone who might look at it apart
from the creator, and also essentially eliminates the ability to change data
in the table and see the change immediately on the chart.

I understand other software may be used for charting, but I haven't been
able to find anything on Google because apparently the word "charting"
usually refers to the charting of stocks, so all the pages I find refer to
software for stocks only. Even with "-stocks", I get charting software for
astrology, family trees, and other financial applications. The only
general-purpose software I've found other than Excel is DeltaGraph, and it
appears that version 5 of DeltaGraph is terminally buggy (so say users on
the discussion board being maintained by Red Rock Software, the new owners
of DeltaGraph: http://support.redrocksw.com/board/index.php?board=4). All I
really need to make is bar, column, line, and XY charts, but I need more
flexibility with them.

(For example, I need a simpler way to break the Y axis than the very clever
trick on Tushar Mehta's page. I'd like to have minor gridlines on the first
quarter of my chart only. I'd like to make a clustered stacked column chart
with out having to fragment my data as Stephen Bullen does at
http://www.bmsltd.co.uk/Excel/SBXLPage.asp#Charting.)

Sorry to run on. Perhaps I could use Illustrator and draw charts by hand?
Any advice greatly appreciated.

Jamie

 

[dvt]

A few options:

KaleidaGraph (www.synergy.com). I've never used it personally, but a
coworker likes it.

Axum (www.mathsoft.com -- what an awful looking page! And it's very hard to
find any info about Axum. I wonder if it's still being sold...). It will
make some really nice charts, but has no capacity to perform any data
processing. And it has a steep learning curve. If you want really nice
graphs and can spend the time, this is a nice package. Note: I haven't
used the latest version, and the company (Mathsoft) doesn't give me a warm
fuzzy. But that's another story....

Matlab (www.mathworks.com). Now you're talking *serious* data processing
capacity. And 3-d charts of many different kinds. Again, a bit of a
learning curve. It's my personal favorite.

If you charting needs are scientific, one of these three should be useful.
I've seen plenty of other software advertised, but these are the three I've
experienced first- or second-hand.

Dave
dvt at psu dot edu

 

[Jamie M.]

Thanks again (you answered one of my earlier posts too, though my name was
listed slightly differently since I was writing from another account).

I think KaleidaGraph might be the one I want. MatLab is absurdly much more
power than I need. I do have a copy of Mathematica at home--do you know if
it can read in an Excel data table and graph it? I'll mess around with it.

Best,

Jamie

 

[dvt]

"Jamie M." ...

I do have a copy of Mathematica at home--do you know if
it can read in an Excel data table and graph it?

Sorry, I don't know. It's been 10 years or more since I did anything with
Mathematica.

Dave
dvt at psu dot edu