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One of the problems is that Excel is used for tasks that it isn't designed for. I'm currently plotting a lot of graphs in Excel (2007) and the experience is ju
by tjoff 14y ago
One of the problems is that Excel is used for tasks that it isn't designed for.
I'm currently plotting a lot of graphs in Excel (2007) and the experience is just dead awful, wanting to quickly change parameters and ranges and sheets to plot is a nightmare. So naturally, I went to find a good specialized tool for this but haven't come up with any. Is Excel cannibalizing the market for such tools despite it being so bad at it?
- starpilot 14y agoYou could code this with Python 2.x (may also be able to get it working with 3.0-3.2), matplotlib, and xlrd. You get professional, highly configurable plots in vector format, but of course give up the interactivity of Excel charts.
- jacques_chester 14y agoI've used gnuplot; though it requires you feed it plain text files.
- wycx 14y agoI found R to be the solution for me. I faced the exact same problem when I wanted to quickly plot lots and lots of X-ray spectra. It was slow and tedious to do in Excel because it involved repetitive plotting of similar data. I put my data into Access, then accessed it using R via ODBC. The cost was the time to validate my data and get it into a database. The benefit was that subsetting and plotting the data became very straightforward, and the source of error was the query and plotting script. Transposition, highlighting the wrong cells, not pasting the correct data, etc were eliminated as sources of error. Plotting via a script is to plotting by hand in excel what using a computer is to photocopying, cutting and pasting physical paper. Repetitive plotting and storing data: tasks for which excel is not really designed.