Modern Graph tool?
mijlee (502 points) | Thu, 2005-09-01 16:46
When will Adobe finally get round to giving us a useful grown up graph tool for Illustrator. I'm a bit sick of upgrading only to find that one of the tools I use most in print design is as it was when I first started in the design industry way back in the midst of time.
At the moment M$ products have more features for creating graphs than Illustrator. I'm not saying that they create graphs that are well designed, they just simply have more options.
I would also like to see a way of linking Excel files to Illustrator files as this is how most of my data comes to me and it's a bit of a pain having to update data inside Illy.
Come on Adobe sort it out.
----------------------
http://mijlee.com
----------------------
Commenting on this Blog entry is closed.
Have you tried Microsoft Excel? I don't think this is a job for Adobe. Adobe produces design-apps, not 'information'-apps.
_________________________
http://www.killbridge.com
_________________________
http://marckohlbrugge.com
M$ is great if you want to wow some corporate board meeting with a whizzy 3d bar graph. The day I use any of Microsoft's products for any kind of design work is the day that hell freezes over. Excel is a good tool for collating data but producing a visual representation is the job of professional design apps like Illy and InDesign.
What I am saying is that it should be easy for me to take a data from an excel file and import it into a predesigned template in Illustrator. I produce well designed graphs using it now but the process is much more time consuming than it should be and is an even bigger pain when the client makes a change to the data at the last minute.
----------------------
http://mijlee.com
----------------------
Freehand has a pretty sophisticated graphing tool. Maybe after the acquisition of Macromedia, they'll borrow that portion before killing Freehand all together.
Terrell Thornhill
e-zign Design Group
As far as I am aware Freehand has the exact same functionality as Illustrator. The problem is that to make any alterations to the look and feel of the graph you first need to break it apart. What I want is a system that allows for customised graphs while still retain editable data or preferably data linked to an external Excel file.
----------------------
http://mijlee.com
----------------------
I've found Keynote 2 can make fairly good looking graphs.
Apple did a fantastic job with Keynote. It has some lovely features for producing charts and they always look stylish and easy to understand. The problem is they are only designed to use in presentations and don't fit into a studio work flow for print.
II want Adobe to build something similar to Keynote tools but it needs to have even more power so that the final output is ready for print and inserting into InDesign or god forbid Quark.
----------------------
http://mijlee.com
----------------------
How timely. I'm about to create a graph for a brochure i'm making with InDesign. Sounds like i will need to use Excel then somehow magically import into InDesign.
Any ideas or a better way to do it. The graph is not rocket-science, but not sure how good InDesign is to create a graph.
thanks,
mrj
InDesign has no built in way of creating graphs and the graphics output by Excel are not useable no matter how you export them.
You need to copy the cell data from Excel into Illustrators' Graph tool.
----------------------
http://mijlee.com
----------------------
I found this infographic, but haven't tried the method myself...
http://bing.biz/samples/smartcharts.jpg
thanks for the link. this is EXACTLY what i was looking for. In fact I will be creating a graph to chart some financial indices.
thanks again,
mrj
I save Excel data as tab-delimited text and import it into Ilustrator, which works well. We do fifancial graphs every month, and this saves us from pasting data and recycling graphs, which caused us problems in the past.
Edd Patton
Austin, TX
I'm trying to just cut and paste my excel data into the Illustrator graph tool but I keep getting a bunch of characters before and after my data numbers so it won't graph. Any ideas? I don't want to have to manually enter my numbers in as I have 7 charts for each of the 24 school systems in my report.
Try to do it one row at a time.
I've done it one row at a time, one column at a time, and one cell at a time, and it still doesn't work, e.g., strange characters before and after.