Non Excel but Excel Related Graphing & Charting Question

[ajones]

I was wondering what were peoples recommendations for good charting and graphing programs were when one needs something beyond what Excel can do. I am working with a friend who is interested in creating increasingly complexity graphs, with various shading, and other effects to bring number in Excel to life.

Ideally we would love something that can read Excel data and work smoothly with Excel. If possible even Inserting the chart back into Excel either on a new sheet or the same sheet as the numbers. This way electronic versions of the information could be sent to others without them needing additional programs to read the file. At the same time this would keep the numbers and charts together.

I have done some initial searching, but would love to hear what others would recommend (or even not recommend as no good) for ease of chart making and taking charts well beyond what Excel does.

I assume there are not any good free/open source add-ons out there?


I know that Excel 2007 is supposed to have some enhanced chart capabilities, but for a variety of reasons we are not ready to test that.


I would love to hear what others think is good or bad out there.

Thanks for your ideas.

Alan

 

[arthurbr]

Alan did you Google to find something?

 

[ajones]

Arthurbr,

Before I posted I did try both Googling things and I searched this message board I just forgot to mention that part.

So far most of my searches referenced how to do charting or advanced charting in Excel.

3rd party products seemed to focus on advanced charting for stock trading.

The one product I ran into was Harvard Graphics stuff like Harvard Graphics Chart XL and Harvard Graphics Instant Charts.

I was wanting a few more options. The full Harvard Graphics suite can run as much as the MS Office Suite.

If anyone has had good / bad things to say about Harvard Graphics charting I would be interested in what you have to say about that also.

thanks again

Alan

 

[Darren Bartrup]

At the moment I'm downloading the free trial for Crystal Xcelsius.

The flash demo looked pretty impressive - very polished charting techniques using data from Excel which can then be exported back to Office documents, PDF, Outlook, or to the web.

http://www.businessobjects.com/products/crystal/default.asp

 

[ajones]

Thanks for the reply.

Looks like a very powerful product.

The graphing features look to be very dynamic, but can't tell if there are as many graph types as the Harvard Graphics option.

For those that are currently looking at this thread or searching and find it let me summarize what I have found so far.

I have not actually used any of them yet. If someone has other suggestions please post and share for others.

Harvard Graphics Chart XL $134.95
http://www.harvardgraphics.com/products/hgchartxl.asp

Looks to be a very powerful charing application. Harvard Graphics also makes what some say is a Powerful Power Point replacement.
http://www.harvardgraphics.com/


Business Objects makes the just mentioned powerful Crystal Xcelsius.
http://www.xcelsius.com/Products/XL_products.html
Demo file available for download.
Standard $195
Pro $495

Crystal Graphics - PowerPlugs: Charts
http://www.crystalgraphics.com/presentations/charts.main.asp
Again some strong graphing and charing
They have all sorts of Excel and PowerPoint temples/add-ons.
$99.00 for basic stuff


hope this helps some others out there

Alan