Statistics: an easy, inexpensive program/method please!!

[Angie Kippers]

Hello to all... We are a small newspaper in New Brunswick, Canada, with a page assembly/design crew of only 3-4. I personally use Illustrator to create graphs accurately. I then ungroup, copy and paste into an InDesign page, add extra text, backgrounds, and any embellishments, etc. from there. Challenge is.. we need all members of this design crew to be able to create quickly and accurately, and I've been told Illustrator is not in the budget. Someone suggested maybe Microsoft Excel can be used to create the graphs. Has anyone had experience doing this. Also any other program suggestions?

[John T. Garcia]

Why not just do them in InDesign and just group them and paste them where they need to be? If you need them in multiples, once finished create an EPS or PDF of the graphic and post on a server.

[David Brauhn]

Quite a few people recommend Inkscape. It's a shareware vector program. www.inkscape.org

[Brian Cragin]

When I use to create graphics, I would chart in excel and bring that into Freehand/Illustrator to put all the graphic polish on it. I think you'll find the styling in Excel is lacking. And you need to watch out for weird spacing sometimes.

[Mike Solita]

Excel can do tons of charts, but they'll look hackjob PowerPoint graphics. If you only have budget for one copy of Illustrator, I'd just have one person be the point-person and crank out whatever basic charts you need that day, then each designer can elaborate on their own in InDesign. Or Photoshop. Or whatever.

But yeah, Illustrator can be a pricey program for people who are only going to use it once in a blue moon.

[Matias Peruyera]

Here we use Freehand to make infographics (and even when it's abandoned, it' much better for our job than Illustrator) and it's great to make charts.
When a chart is so complex that Freehand crashes, I usually plot it in Microsoft Excel, then copy and paste (or paste special) into Freehand. Everything is editable as vector graphics.
That must work also with copy-pasting from Excel to InDesign, or OpenOffice to InDesign, or even OpenOffice to Inkscape.

[Rama]

friend there are many website like Graphsy.com

[Angie Kippers]

Thanks Rama: will look into this;great site.

[Rama]

well if u have friend then look to www.makeuseof.com it has many useful tool for your use

[Evan Hill]

aviary.com is working on a cloud suite of graphics programs. It's in beta now, but you might be able to find something that works for the time being.

[Brian Cragin]

Find what you were looking for?

[Javier Zarracina]

If you´re working with Macintosh, maybe an alternative to consider for simple graphics is Iwork´s Numbers- is not very expensive and It can export graphics in pdfs or cut and paste into illustrator or indesign. Also it can be templated for simple charts and graphs