Better ways of producing reports with nice graphs

[danmurf]

Hi

Does anyone know if there's a way of producing some nicer graphs with Excel, other than the standard ones? Maybe some ways to make them look nicer or maybe animated? I was hoping to find some sort of plug-in.

It might be that Excel can't do this and I need some reporting software. Any help appreciated.

Thanks
Dan

 

[Greg Truby]

Excel can produce quite a nice variety of stuff if you just know how to do it. Have a look at Jon Peltier's site. It has lots of great examples and tutorials.

 

[danmurf]

Excel can produce quite a nice variety of stuff if you just know how to do it. Have a look at Jon Peltier's site. It has lots of great examples and tutorials.

Thanks a lot for the link, some good tutorials there!
I was also thinking along the lines of animated charts, do you know anyway to make these? The only ones I've seen so far are Flash based ones which need a database backend, none that can be used with Excel. Any ideas?

Many thanks
Dan

 

[Greg Truby]

Someone that was reasonably adept at VBA could most definitely "animate" a chart. I'm not sure I would suggest to a VBA newbie to give it a go unless he had a burning desire to learn how and the spare time to dedicate to it. If you want animation, you might play with PowerPoint a bit and see if it and do what you're looking for using its built-in functions.

 

[danmurf]

Some of the chart software I've seen can produce Flash charts where the bars grow, and when you hover over areas they display data etc. I'm not really up for learning VBA, I'd rather just find a package that could make the graphs. There seems to be a lot of software out there, but not as much which works with Excel (they mainly use sql and xml). I guess it's more reporting software that I'm after which can take the data from Excel.

If anyone knows of any packages that might fit please let me know, it would be much appreciated

Thanks for the advice Greg!

Dan