anyone know of good software

[StevieC]

for download that can not only compile professional looking graphs (although Excel for the most part is good at that) but is also good for drawing your own professional looking charts and matrices?

Posts merged:

f*ck it, I'll use Excel.

[matty]

Excel.

[Stevie H]

etch-a-sketch.

[Kahnee]

Magna-doodle

[kozma]

[Kahnee]

1123054[/snapback]

 

As tested by Spiderman

[Scally the Wag]

Excel is very limited for data representation...

 

Try drawing a real histogram and see what happens...

 

Variant class widths & proportional areas? Sorry mate, can't do.

 

I was drawing histograms in junior school: it was a real turn off when I discovered (twenty years on) that the mighty E couldn't do the same for some notes I was setting.

 

Actually, the whole maths programs business sucks. I've tried various routes down the years and still not found software that really does the business without fuss.

 

Have been looking at recommendations by Shadow Moon recently: look promising (LaTex based).

 

My biggest gripe with E is that every thing you produce, as with Word, looks like it has been produced using E or W. In situations where you need more control over the graphics/formatting etc or when you just want to stand out from the crowd, that isn't sufficient.

[Shadow Moon]

I never learnt Excel, because for the data analyses required of me, I would have to use a program like Stata or S-PLUS, which I do. Both are statistical packages that produce excellent, professional looking graphics (histrograms, pie charts, scatterplots, and more).

 

But as for *drawing* stuff, i.e., I don't have a dataset to analyze but I just want to draw something like line graph for pedagogical purposes, I have never gone this route. Sorry.

[fyds]

CorelGraph - a part of the Coreldraw package - excellent stuff for what you want.