Recommendations for a charting tool?

Subject: Recommendations for a charting tool?
From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 08:47:28 -0400


Paul Sparrow-Clarke wondered: <<Is there any good software that easily
creates charts and graphs for use in Word documents? I find that Word's
charting feature is, to put it politely, somewhat limited and difficult.>>

Although it's possible to create passable graphs in Excel, it's far more
awkward than it should be, and you don't have the same level of control that
a dedicated graphing package offers. Moreover, using Excel creates a strong
temptation to embed spreadsheet objects in Word, and that's often a recipe
for disaster; at a minimum, it makes it difficult to move the files
elsewhere and enormously increases the file size. It also makes it difficult
to produce good PostScript output if you're following that kind of
publishing workflow.

The package of choice used to be "DeltaGraph" after they released the first
or second patch to the current release; before that, they were often a bit
buggy. I don't have a current URL for the developer, but you should find it
plus a review of other competing packages at PC Magazine's Web site
(www.pcmag.com). Search their articles database for the review of
graphing/charting software (or for DeltaGraph itself) to find the review
article they did a few years back.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada

"Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an
accumulation of facts is no more science than a heap of stones is a
house"--Jules Henri Poincaré


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