Jon,
> The absolute best advice concerning the use of Excel for
> graphics (or for statistics for that matter) is: DON'T!
>
> The _majority_ of graph-types available in Excel should never
> be used for any purpose as they produce misleading graphs -- mainly
> false third dimensions that can only serve to hide important features
> in the graph.)
But Excel CAN produce simple scatter plots or bar charts. It is just that
the defaults are so horrible. With a lot of tweaking you can make them
acceptable. Having said that I do remember an article on the Origin web
site which suggested even simple charts in Excel were wrong.
My problem is cost. I want to get everyone in my department to have the
facility to produce reasonable charts that have a common style. I do all
of mine in Statistica (a single copy) but I cannot afford 15 copies
simply to produce the occasional scatter plot, or box plot. Nor does
anyone have the time to produce everyone elses charts for them.
Three Excel addins have come my way, during this search. XLstat,
Analyse-IT and Winstat. All produce boxplots, and Winstat seems the most
generally useful, but for some reason the Winstat chart defaults are
useless for scientific/technical use.
None are entirely satisfactory, and I am still looking for the best
solution.
Cheers,
Graham S
.
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