uoustool

The answer to your question depends on what you mean by "better than MS
Excel". What are you looking for: business charts, multidimensional charts,
statistical charts, trellis charts, dot plots, parallel coordinate plots?
Excel with "workarounds" is fine for business charts. If you have
multidimensional data, then you may want to consider R.

R is one of the best statistical charting tools, it is free and very
powerful. There is an Excel add-in that lets the user run R from within
Excel. Here's a brief introduction to R's charting.
http://processtrends.com/TOC_R.htm

R is developed and supported by thousands of statisticians worldwide. They
provide high quality packages that add functionality to the basic R package.
You can get the R base system and all packages free from the Comprehensive R
Archival Network (CRAN) http://cran.r-project.org/ . New packages and
charting tools are added to the R system on an ongoing basis.

Here's a link to an R Graphics Gallery
http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/

Paul Murrel has a very good book on R Graphics. This link shows you the
charts from his book and the R code needed to build them.
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/%7Epa...rgraphics.html

Hadley Wickham has an R package ggplot/2 that is quite powerful.
http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/

Are you involved with high dimension data? If so, the GGobi may be what you
need. http://www.ggobi.org/. There is a R package for Ggobi
http://lookingatdata.com/.

If you plan to use advanced charting extensively, then R offers you much
more promise than Excel.

Post back or contact me at my website if you would like more information.

Kelly O'Day
http://processtrends.com







"Del Cotter" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 11 Aug 2008, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
said:
Any clue of what software the people at The Economist uses to create
charts? I'm wondering whether there is some software out there better
than MS Excel that would give better control without the onerous
workarounds.

I think they use drawing packages like Adobe Illustrator to work the
results of a graph program (which is probably Excel) into something that
looks prettier. In other words, it's an even more onerous workaround for
them, but they're prepared to pay art staff to do it all day, in order to
have something that looks nice for the magazine.

As you haven't got a magazine editor's budget, the place to look for
good-looking graphs without excess manual labor is away from the magazines
rather than toward them.

--
Del Cotter
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