Advice On Graphic Creation Through Excel

[JamesHood1984]

Hi

This is my first post so please excuse any mistakes I make towards the etiquette of this forum.

I'm a graphic designer and I've been tasked with researching a platform that can create bespoke "infographic" graphics for a client.
I'm looking for some advice on wether or not Excel has the capabilities to do what my client is after.
With my limited knowledge of Excel I know it can create graphs but was hoping that using some clever mathematics and formulas it could create the graphic we have been given.

A little bit of the background behind the request
We've been asked to find or create a "tool" that can be used to generate an infographic-style graphic for sales presentations.
These infographics will need to be bespoke and created on the go (just before slaes meetings).
The tool must be easy to use.
The tool should be an offline platform - hence Excel being one of the avenues of research as the sales team already have.
The tool needs to export out a jpeg or png of the "infographic" to be used in the presentation.

More info on the infographic:

• We are trying to recreate the attached images
• The middle circle's text can be updated
• The number of icons around the edge can be updated
• Icons come from a list inside the excel sheet that someone can select from, the list will be updated/expanded with icons in the future
• The icons need to be evenly spread around the middle circle

If there is any more information you need let me know.

Thanks

James

 

[Dan_W]

Yes. Excel can do this - in fact, any of the Office Suite can do this. You should check out the SmartArt feature - there are dozens of designs there already, and if they don't suit, you can change and edit the shapes and adjust as you prefer. It took me (someone with precisely zero design skills) less than a minute to skim through the collection, find the Hezagonal Radial template, change the hezagonal shapes to circles and rearrange them. You can add icons and/or text to any of the radial nodes, and it is trivially easy to update the text.
And that's just the smartart options - it is possible to draw the entire thing with the shapes/picture tools by hand if you wanted.
Supported exported image formats include JPG and PNG (transparent). If you get really adventurous, you can use the programming language VBA to automate the whole thing for you.