So I am looking for a truly professional tool (not the jack of all trades and master of none that Micro$oft dishes out) that will generate complex graphs from the data and will give me full flexibility to format these graphs to fit any page layout without changing fonts, dropping lines etc. (which Excel does). Wojtek
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You'll have to check the latest version, but I used Adobe Illustrator for a series of graphs from experimental and computer simulated data sets that I think were from Excel spreadsheets. The spreadsheet data sets were loaded into Illustrator and generated the graphs. You have to fiddle around a lot with the chart scales to get them to work right. You can select the kind of line (dots, dashes, dot + dashes, long dashs, or bars, or circle graphs, etc).
You then arrange the charts on individual pages (finished format proporitions, US letter, A4, etc) and save it as an EPS file with a preview. The EPS (postscript with a special header and bounding box) file can be embedded in a text layout program like Framemaker or Quark. Framemaker or Quark will have tools to scale the images to fit the layout. If you're really serious geek, you can pull the EPS file into a unix system, strip the header and convert it back to straight a postscript file and use it in a layout it with TeX.
Use a very common typeface like Courier, Times Roman or Helvetica for the x-y axes labeling and pick an even numbered size like 8pt, 10pt or 12pt. If the output system doesn't have the particular font, and uses a substitute font, then hopefully it will be kerned close to the original. Don't play with the fonts at all. Postscript will only supply the spec for the font, not the font itself. So the output system has to have the font for the printed output to come out right. If you only have minor labeling such as numbers you can convert the font to postscript (this vastly increases the file size). This conversion allows other programs to scale the image and text uniformly without any font information needed---but it increases the file size many times.
The real advantage to a postscript line art program like Illustrator is that you can physically manipulate the graphs through line tools, fills, and scaling, then lock them down. The text layout or wordprocessor program puts the preview into their file format, but not the original. Once these layout program files go to a commerical digital printer (or your fancy postscript printer), their stripping programs will use the original eps files which are large and place them correctly to produce film. You can also embbed them in slide programs to produce overheads or slides or convert them to PDF or to bitmaps and lay them out for web sites.
I did a scientific poster with Illustrator with four or five data set graphs, a reproduced b&w photo (from another research team) and a series of false color microscopy files generated in Photoshop, along with some math equations. It was a nightmare to lay out in columns for a 22" x 34" two page tabloid spread. But it was beautiful. I cut and pasted the Iris color images onto Lino b&w (1250 dpi) output. I spent hours doing the math equations in Illustrator and converting them to postscript so they would scale with the other text and images correctly.
If you do this kind of work very often it is worth the money to buy a Mac and graphic design software to go with it---or borrow one.
Probably more than you wanted to hear...
CG