David:
I have certainly never said nor implied that Excel cannot produce reasonably
good graphics. My
concern is that it makes it so easy to produce poor
graphics. The defaults are absurd and
should never be used. It seems to me that
defaults should produce at least
something useful. The default graphs are certainly not good
business graphs
if the intent is to produce good visual display of quantitative
information!
Isn't that what graphs are for?
[David
Heiser]
The
EXCEL chart defaults are as you say are poor, for an
audience/users of statisticians/scientists/engineers. Even going to the
effort to make a lot of changes to the defauts, you never really get an
outstanding graph, like you would find in a professional
publication.
The
default charts are specifically set-up for the type of business applications
(i.e. sales, gross income, expenses, operating costs, salesmen performances,
product distributions, etc.), in which bar and column charts appear to be
meaningful and the presentation of 3D graphs impressive (at least for
a late 1980's audience). The Microsoft User's manual clearly
identifies the audience for which EXCEL charts were developed for. This
user/audience is essentially the same one that ACCESS was written for. The
chart defaults generate useful charts for management and tracking of product
sales and sales efforts.
What
we have now is an entirely different user/audience using EXCEL to do something
it was never designed to do.
The
EXCEL ToolPak pack represents the way things were done and viewed in the
1980's. Essentially it is a 20 year old package, that never has been updated.
In 2002 we have been exposed to the tremendously impressive game displays and
the capability of the many (new) statistical software programs, and now want
better graphics.
I
don't think that Microsoft will improve the graphics, leaving it to the
developers to create and market separate programs and add-ones to EXCEL to
give better graphics. I don't think Office XP (EXCEL 2002) is any different
from EXCEL version 5.0.
What
would be helpful, would be an EXCEL front end for a developer computation
package that would in turn generate a standard interface to separate graphics
packages. In a competitive world, there would be interface standards, so that
one could buy and separate software packages. However again cost enters in,
and EXCEL as a stand-alone package is for most users the economic choice. So
we have to accept the poor EXCEL graphics and computational limitations,
because in many business's they only have the Microsoft Office application,
and under their ground rules (and usage/liscensing requirements), you have to
use their EXCEL for any computations and presentations. This is the
environment, I have had to work in.
Then
on top of it you have such schools as the University of Phoenix who teach
undergraduate stat as a course in using EXCEL only.
