Softwares to make nice looking graphs?
 

Hi

Microsoft Excel graphs are pretty much overused and boring, and I'm in need of a software that can make better looking tables and graphs.
Does anybody happen to know any? Other softwares that I know is OpenOffice.
I've seen many great 3d/glass/plasma graphcs and was wondering how they are made? Pure 3D program?

Any help is much appreciated :)

Can you link to examples of what you might consider as "nice looking charts"?

Have none in particular - but they are usually found in reports from consultants from other companies.

http://antoniocangiano.com/images/sh...mean_small.png

http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/gunnarp...chart-3d_3.png

If you are familiar with working in Python, then I recommend checking out the Matplotlib extension.

Thumbnail gallery — Matplotlib v0.98.6svn documentation

It's got quite a bit of flexibility, plus I've always found that a scripting environment is more ideal than excel for automating your graphs.

EDIT -- I used it to make plots like this, which I can regenerate as more data is added.

You can see if newer versions of Origin can make nice plots, though I imagine that's fairly low on their priorities since they're mostly about doing statistical analysis and lots of plotting options.

gaming, both charts you presented can be done in Excel.

The first one, in fact, is a default Excel 2007 bar chart with the MS Office color theme.

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