

Better Excel charts - karamazov
https://datanitro.com/blog/2013/6/4/Better_Excel_charts/

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dpcx
Not that I'm saying Excel's graphing is excellent, but the graphs at
<https://datanitro.com/blog/assets/img/chart3.PNG> are a bit of a cheat since
there's very little customization done to the Excel graph.

That may be intentional, but needs to be noted.

~~~
Breakthrough
Another thing worth mentioning is _how_ the plots were made. Here, the author
seems to have just _taken screenshots from MS Excel, and not actually exported
anything_ to a portable format. Even the jagged, choppy Excel graphs look
fairly smooth when exported as a .PDF file (as Excel _does_ save the vector
data for smooth curves) or another comparable _vector_ format.

Specifically, in the author's first example (the exponentially decaying
sinusoid), viewing that graph __in MS Excel __will always appear jagged and
pixellated. However, if you were to export the chart as a .PDF, the aliasing
artifacts would completely disappear (or at least be comparable with the
Python-rendered example). I use this technique when I make some quick
charts/graphs in Excel and want to include them in a LaTeX document. You can
move a chart/graph to it's own full-page "worksheet", and then Save As a PDF
file. Since the PDF output is in vector format, it works nicely with LaTeX
documents (as you can use \includegraphics{} natively with .PDF documents),
and scales well to any size without artifacts.

That being said, there is one thing I do agree with here: the way MS Excel
renders graphs/charts when editing them is pretty horrible. You can, however,
get around the issue by choosing an appropriate output format (you might just
have to zoom in a lot when editing to avoid the aliasing temporarily).

~~~
Osmium
> That being said, there is one thing I do agree with here: the way MS Excel
> renders graphs/charts when editing them is pretty horrible. You can,
> however, get around the issue by choosing an appropriate output format (you
> might just have to zoom in a lot when editing to avoid the aliasing
> temporarily).

The thing is, there's no excuse for that. Excel graphs should be good by
default. Same with the OP's issue. The amount of time I've wasted pretty-ing
up an Excel graph is crazy. DataNitro looks great. Shame it's Windows only
though...

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amirhirsch
mandelbrot in excel: [http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2007/10/mandelbrot-
set-in-...](http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2007/10/mandelbrot-set-in-
excel.html)

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cpursley
I downloaded datanitro - seems promising, but I'd like to see more case
studies / tutorials.

~~~
karamazov
Thanks for trying it out!

We have some more examples on our blog: <https://datanitro.com/blog/>

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LinaLauneBaer
I may be wrong here but shouldn't graphs like the one showing the stock price
of Apple start at 0.00?

Te graph starts at 300 on the y-axis.

If this is true the excel chart may be better in that specfic case.

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guiomie
Obviously no graphical tweaks were made on the excel graph.

