Graham S wants some advice on using Excel for technical and scientific
graphing.
Not to be too contrarian, but one option you might consider is stop drawing
graphs. Obviously your management does not consider high quality graphs as
being worth investing in.
This may sound like I am a traitor to the cause of statistics. But a lot of
folks (e.g., Ehrenberg and Tufte) recommend that if the number of points
displayed in a graph is small, then you may be better off displaying them in
a table rather than in a graph.
Excel does wonderful tables. You have so much control over how the data is
displayed (fonts, colors, background, precision, alignment). With a bit of
effort you can make things look very nice and clean and easy to follow.
A table would not work well for some things, like illustrating a non-linear
trend. But a table is far better than those awful 3D bar charts that
everyone uses.
Check out this Ehrenberg reference:
Ehrenberg, A.S.C. (1981) "The Problem of Numeracy," The American
Statistician, 35(2), 67-71.
Steve Simon, [EMAIL PROTECTED], Standard Disclaimer.
STATS: STeve's Attempt to Teach Statistics. http://www.cmh.edu/stats
P.S. Have you investigated getting a site license for some graphics and/or
statistics software that limits the number of concurrent users? Sometimes
that is not as expensive as you might think.
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