Fluther: Windows software for making nice graphs?

Windows software for making nice graphs?

Asked by grumpyfish (6657

) December 2nd, 2009
10 responses
“Great Question” (0

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I’ve been using plot on my Mac to great sucess, but wondering if there’s anything for windows that works as well or better?

Mostly looking to be able to do attractive graphs with tight controls over all of the graphics of the graph.

E.g., things like this: http://folio.benpeoples.com/img/v1/p67192998.png

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Topics: data, graphics, Graphs, information design, tufte

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Answers

Microsoft Excel.

erichw1504 (26453

)“Great Answer” (1

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@erichw1504 srsly?

grumpyfish (6657

)“Great Answer” (0

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If you know how to use it, you could probably make something very similar, if not exactly like the graph you provided as an example.

erichw1504 (26453

)“Great Answer” (1

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Fair enough =) I think whenever I’ve tried to go down that route, I end up giving up b/c it’s just too complex to figure out how to get it to NOT do what it wants to do =)

grumpyfish (6657

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Yes, it can be tricky.

erichw1504 (26453

)“Great Answer” (0

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Excel is your best bet…just play. Once you get the hang of it, it’s quite simple.

Val123 (12734

)“Great Answer” (1

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Excel is terrible for serious graphing (i.e. I would never use excel for a major presentation or publication). For quick graphs or day-to-day use it is fine, but sophisticated graphs with multiple output styles do not exist in Excel (I doubt graphing is Microsoft’s focus with Excel anyway. Excel is mainly a spreadsheet program.)

Currently, I use GraphPad Prism (which is available for both Macs and PCs). I’ve used Deltagraph in the past, and I also know a lot of people that use SigmaPlot. Indeed, (as a marketing tool), deltagraph compared their product to Excel to show how limited are the graphing options and the output styles in Excel.

shilolo (18075

)“Great Answer” (3

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If you’d like to get into the highly versatile programs you could try MathLAB or Mathematica. Takes a while to get to know, but they’re really powerful and also produce nice 3d graphs (if you’d ever like to use them).

Flarlarlar (303

)“Great Answer” (1

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If you need super serious graphing i’d reccomend “R”. It’s freeware, and it will graph anything you want and more, but the learning curve is quite steep (it’s basically a programming language).

http://images.google.com/images?hl=sv&source=hp&q=R+graph&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=bNkWS53SN8fA-QbdgY3kBg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCYQsAQwAw

http://www.r-project.org/

nisse (1986

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