Charting program or add-in

[jboneca]

Hey party people,
I love Excel, but I'm quickly realizing the limited charting capabilities. Unfortunately I am also realizing that there are not many alternatives. I need something that allow for quick creation of stacked bar charts, chart of chart segments, quicker way to add notes, double histo for two independent variables, etc.

Anyone know any good alternatives to or workarounds within Excel for charting?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Derek Brown]

I have found that the best site for chart help, ideas and utilities is Chart Utilities and Tutorials for Microsoft Excel by Peltier Technical Services and for Excel Dashboards it has to be ExcelUser—training about reports, dashboards, charts, & formulas

 

[SydneyGeek]

I'll second that. Another good site for dashboards is chandoo.org

Denis

 

[jboneca]

Thanks fellas I'll give them a try. Just wish there was a standalone program that could make really elegant charts without it being a struggle.

 

[L33]

If you're looking for something to create charts to supplement Excel, have a look at Tableau: Fast Analytics and Rapid-fire Business Intelligence from Tableau Software | Tableau Software. I've only just discovered it myself (ie. within the last few days) but it looks fantastic. The "Public" version is free but you have to be careful as you can only save to the web and as I understand it anyone can stumble across what you create (could be wrong about that), so be careful with sensitive and/or proprietary data. I'm practically sold on it already, so need to convince powers-that-be to pay for a full version.

 

[jboneca]

Thanks a bunch L33 - I'm going to definitely take a look at this once I get into work, but it looks exactly like what I was looking for. Let me know your experience as well. I'm with you though, full version will require some convincing and we definitely can't have the charts accessible online (though I'm sure there has to be a way to save locally only).

 

[jboneca]

Tableau is awesome, so far. I've also found PHP Charts & Graphs | Create Beautiful AJAX HTML5 Charts & Graphs in PHP which seems promising also. Though it's completely unrelated to Excel, so might not be for everyone.