All the charting software has its pros, the biggest one usually being that
it's not PPT, and so it makes better looking charts.
The con is always that the user must have that application installed if they
want to be able to edit the charts. That's almost always the most important
consideration for me because of last-minute changes -- what application has
the most critical mass that I can rely on it to be installed on almost every
system? That would be MS Graph that is inherent to PPT and also Excel. I do
quite a bit of graphing in Excel.
Illustrator makes nice charts.
http://www.adobe.com and
http://www.digitalmediadesigner.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=31554
Prism is a fairly heavy-duty charting program that can make some nice
looking stuff.
http://www.graphpad.com/prism/tutorials/PowerPoint/powerpoint.htm I thought
it was pretty cool that I got actual MANUALS (!) I mean I got REAL BOOKS (!)
when I purchased Prism. Coolio!
Xcelsius seems to be able to do some really nice stuff also. I haven't had a
chance to work much with it yet, but I'm getting ready to start playing.
http://www.infommersion.com/
Blue Pacific has a "Rich Chart Builder" that makes some sharp stuff as well.
http://blue-pacific.com/products/richchartbuilder/ I messed around with this
the other day and found it to be pretty neat. It can do some cool Flash
animations, too, so if you're doing web-based stuff, it might be a
frontrunner.
Crystal Graphics has a PowerPlugs Charting plug-in thing.
http://www.crystalgraphics.com/presentations/charts.main.asp My only real
complaint with it is that I pretty much had to totally disable my high-end
video card in order to use the charting plug-in. Once I did that, though, it
worked great. Oh, I think I wasn't able to ungroup the charts, though, so
animating them was pretty much out of the question. I haven't tried that
with most of the others, though, so maybe it's unfair to bring up wrt this
product. (Prism charts will indeed ungroup -- they end up in little tiny
pieces a la ungrouping a WMF, but they are still ungroupable. Delta Graph
graphs at least used to ungroup, but it's been a long time since I used that
software.)
Interesting. Amigo (Amigo2000) seems to be available still.
http://www.threedgraphics.com/tdg/products/consumer/amigo2000/default.asp I
thought Crystal Graphics bought it and turned it into their plug-in. Hmmmm.
Guess maybe I thought wrong!
And here's a different Amigo.
http://www.amigocharts.com/index.html
Delta Graph -- been a long time since I used this.
http://www.rockware.com/catalog/pages/deltagraphw.html
I'm sure there are others...
