I need to make Excel/Powerpoint-style charts.

[mark]

This isn't a terribly helpful post, but I wrote a script that would
collect data from a database using an SQL query.  This data was written
to a file which was then imported into Excel using a macro to do all the
sorting and chart creation.  I guess there's a learning curve either
way, but it is another way to go about it, since you mentioned that
you're using Excel already.

I believe it's possible to call out an instance of Excel and provide
arguments to tell it which file to open and what to do with it.  I'm
sure there's someone here with a better idea on exactly how to do that
(I didn't get that far before I changed jobs).


- Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: python-list-admin at python.org [mailto:python-list-admin at python.org]
On Behalf Of python at sarcastic-horse.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 8:19 AM
To: python-list at python.org
Subject: I need to make Excel/Powerpoint-style charts.

Hi-


My office produces a lot of charts based on time-series data.  We use MS
powerpoint and excel to make these charts.  The data gets updated
regularly, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to automate updating
the charts using these packages.  So, we spend a non-trivial amount of
time manually updating lots of spreadsheets to redraw the charts we
need.

I hope to find some sort of python graphics library that can make charts
similar to Excel and Powerpoint, and then I can start automating these
tasks.

Here is an example of the charts we make:

http://www.sarcastic-horse.com/example.pdf #52k size file.

Are there any packages that can do similar charts?  I need to be able to
chart time-series data with occasional missing observations.  I also
need
to be able to shade some regions of the charts, and add text titles,
captions and notes.

I'm (slowly) learning the reportlab package, and it looks good, but I
wanted to check if there was an even better solution out there.

Thanks for the help.

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