3-D Graphs

[danakay]

I've been using Illustrator for years to create mass quantities of bar/line/pie charts my client's Excel or PPT data. I'm starting to explore programs to create sexier (3 dimensional and shading, etc.) graphs.

Any recommendations?

[ktinkel]

I've been using Illustrator for years to create mass quantities of bar/line/pie charts my client's Excel or PPT data. I'm starting to explore programs to create sexier (3 dimensional and shading, etc.) graphs.

Any recommendations?What do you want to end up with?

That is, I always considered Illustrator as the tool for making dry Excel data visual and easy to understand.

But there is a limit to that. If you read Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information or Envisioning Information), less is emphatically more.

[danakay]

I'm just looking for a bit of dimension. No flash.

[ElyseC]

I'm just looking for a bit of dimension. No flash.I have no idea of how it is today, but long ago I tried Deltagraph (http://www.rockware.com/catalog/pages/deltagraph.html), but I don't know that it does vectors. I think I created the 3-D graph the way I wanted, then took whatever image format it exported as, plunked it in a template layer of an Illustrator file and redrew it from scratch as vectors.

Come to think of it, I think I also did that a few times with Excel, only I think I printed from Excel to a PostScript file and opened the .ps in Illustrator, adjusting and/or redrawing as needed from there.