ILLUSTRATING

On a non-political and lighter note than usual.. this morning I stumbled on a website page about creating charts in a more professional way. I'm a real Excel veteran, given that I started using spreadsheets back in the days of Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS based PCs with only a keyboard and no mouse in sight - no really! But, those Excel charts can only be pushed so far - and modelling the whole of the UK's water resource flows and stocks was about as far as you could go! I do use dashboards and can create interesting effects in Excel, such as this..


..but their presentation is growing tired I must admit. Enter three options. First is to use an add-in to Excel to increase its design look and feel. Already noe that though, and regularly use Xcelsius. It's ok, a little lcunky but good for 3-D'ing charts I guess.

Second is to ditch Excel (or rather use it to do the heavy computing and modelling) and use another output format such as Business Objects standalone packages. Expensive. Good output, but still not that pro edge and editability I want.

Third is to go to a full fledged vector graphic format. Cue Adobe Illustrator. We use Creative Suite 3 in the office and it is installed on my PC. But I tend to stick to the web-design bits of CS3, Dreamweaver and Fireworks mainly with a (very small) bit of Flash thrown in. Illustrator doesn't fill me with dread but I haven't a clue what I'm doing in it! Anyway, I stumbled on a page about 3D graphs and using Illustator's in-built charting tool.. which led me to doing this in around 5 minutes..


So, be prepared for more to come as this is seriously easy to do, can be applied to a full chart, has lots of options and can use any graphic to overlay and create a really professional look and feel.

More later. Illustrator is about to take up a good few days of my time!