Not too sure what the difference is. Apart from yours not showing ‘%’ in the left axis and therefore having less information. Are you really saying that removing some boxes is a reason to change your office suite?

Didn’t you know? Less is more!

With the attention span of the average hack these days, the extra % signs and boxes mean that they have lost interest before they have got to the actual data

Personally I have uninstalled Excel 2007 and and gone back to 2003 because of the terrible graphs in 2007. I use graphs for scientific purposes, not presentations, and its far far harder to many things I want (eg customise them to multiple data sets) in 2007. MS has gone down the road of making it easier for a casual user to make something and harder for a real user to make what he needs.

@josh Matt Sparkes has written about alternative tools in his post, which you’ll find just above this one. “…get back to writing decent articles.” As I said right at the end, this was only a quick point, and I was reacting to it (quickly) during a presentation. This is the PC Pro blog, not the PC Pro In Depth section..

Umm, I’m sure with a tiny bit of effort, you could make the Excel 2003 chart look just like the Excel 2007 chart. Just need to right-click and change the colour, scale and shapes etc. Less than 20secs – Looks more like they didn’t think making it look pretty was that important!!

An Excel Chart is as good as its creator’s imagination and adherence to good practise. Sad of Acer not to demonstrate this.

You can adjust an Excel graph ad infinitum to show a picture that truly represents an understandable trend in a pattern of numbers. 2007 has the advantage of its 3D graphics – BUT at the expense of speed.

In Excel 2003 I could programme in VBA x =x+1 (or similar) and loop it to produce a graph ‘firing’ ‘bullets’ or ‘missiles’ and the graph would refresh as fast as the on-board processor allows – fast. In running in 2007, on the same graph, the moving point crawls across the graph ruining one of my best exercises.