funky graphics table charting software

[ranj]

Hi

 

I know that in packages like office you can use some like excel to put some figures in and for it to produce graphs and charts.

 

A client of ours is looking to produce really funky graphics, they are not happy with using excel as the clients they are presenting too are big companies in the field.

 

now they were looking at some software called perspector which is an addin for powerpoints which provides the sort of thing they are looking for and to make the visually pleasing.

 

I thought I would ask the question if anyone knows of any other alternative software which can provide this. My thoughts on this was to use the latest version of Microsoft Office, I know by experience that its a lot better and visually pleasing that older versions of office.

 

It would be interesting to hear other peoples thoughts on this..

 

Thanks

[Sylv3r]

Google chart?

 

Developer's Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code

[dhicks]

A client of ours is looking to produce really funky graphics, they are not happy with using excel as the clients they are presenting too are big companies in the field.

 

In what way are the graphics "funky"? Something like Crystal Reports is designed to take data in and spew out pretty-looking charts, or there are toolkits available for various scripting languages to create charts from data you pass in. We wanted a type of chart that Excel couldn't produce, and we're too cheap to buy Crystal Reports or a charting plugin, so I spent most of the summer period producing a Python script to produce various charts for our exam results. You can get toolkits that produce "interactive" charts as Flash objects or similar that do various stuff when you drag over things or click on things.

 

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David Hicks

[ranj]

In what way are the graphics "funky"? Something like Crystal Reports is designed to take data in and spew out pretty-looking charts, or there are toolkits available for various scripting languages to create charts from data you pass in. We wanted a type of chart that Excel couldn't produce, and we're too cheap to buy Crystal Reports or a charting plugin, so I spent most of the summer period producing a Python script to produce various charts for our exam results. You can get toolkits that produce "interactive" charts as Flash objects or similar that do various stuff when you drag over things or click on things.

 

--

David Hicks

 

The issue is they are complaining that their competitors presentations just look really good, where when they need to do a presentation it just fairly standard and not 'visually pleasing'.

 

does that make sense?

[MattMitchell]

I've recently (!) discovered that ms publisher now supports automation since 2003 (don't laugh) if you fancy rolling your own, or you could generate PowerPoint slides from vba too