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.

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.

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.

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.

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