Chart/Graph Tool???

[Paul Bunyar]

Hello,

 

I am a graphic designer in the financial services industry. We regularly create charts and graphs for printed materials. We are stuck with Illustrator since it is the only tool we know of that will generate a chart from data that stays intact for updating and provides us with a vector final format.

 

Now Illustrator is okay, maybe even good. But the chart/graph tool hasn't changed much since 1990. Really. I do know. There are other programs that can make charts but that don't provide the use of Pantone colors, easy updating, and that vector format plus will easily import data from Excel or other spreadsheets. Designer looks like it can take the place of Illustrator in most cases. Why not take Illustrator's place as a charting tool too? Or you could go the extra mile and create a vector chart making application that ticks all the necessary boxes.

 

Thanks.

Paul Bunyar

Shawnee, Kansas, USA

[MEB]

Hi Paul,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

I'm moving this thread to the Feature Requests since this is basically a request and there's more chances to be picked there.

Thanks for your feedback.

[Alfred]

I am a graphic designer in the financial services industry. We regularly create charts and graphs for printed materials. We are stuck with Illustrator since it is the only tool we know of that will generate a chart from data that stays intact for updating and provides us with a vector final format.

 

Now Illustrator is okay, maybe even good. But the chart/graph tool hasn't changed much since 1990. Really. I do know. There are other programs that can make charts but that don't provide the use of Pantone colors, easy updating, and that vector format plus will easily import data from Excel or other spreadsheets.

 

Have you considered using the font FF Chartwell for this? All you need to do is export your data to CSV from Excel (or whatever) and then use 'Find and Replace' in a text editor to replace every comma with a plus sign, giving you a sequence of characters that FF Chartwell will turn into a chart when discretionary ligatures are switched on.

[Paul Bunyar]

We have used Chartwell for some simple charts. But most of our charts are created from very detailed data over a period of ten years or more. For example, Chartwell cannot make a line chart with a fund, three indexes, and quarterly data over a forty year period. I wish it could.

 

Illustrator does this, but we must jump through a lot of hoops to clean up the data to make it work in Illustrator's archaic worksheet. For example, if we use dollar figures in a line chart, Illustrator will not accept those numbers with dollar signs on the front or commas separating the hundreds. So we have to clean up the numbers before the app will create the chart.

[Peterkaosa]

I totally agree with Paul, charts would be the killer feature for AD!!! You can guess the importance of my statement – I used three exclamation marks. Something I'd never do in normal life.

[Patrick Connor]

Adding charts well to PagePlus took over 2 man years, and that was in an application that already had tables to hold the data. Consequently this feels more like a Publisher feature request to me, or even a separate app.

[Hervé Pfeiffer]

Adding charts well to PagePlus took over 2 man years, and that was in an application that already had tables to hold the data. Consequently this feels more like a Publisher feature request to me, or even a separate app.

 

 

Most of Data Designers use Illustrator to create charts… except that the chart tools in Illustrator haven't been updated for 27 years!!!

 

There's a huge gap in the market for a chart designing tool, that is powerful, up-to-date, and easy to use. I'm fed up with Illustrator for that matter, as you really can't create anything (dynamic) except pie charts, line charts and bar charts…

 

We need flow charts, treepmaps, etc. I know a bunch of designers who'd switch to AfDesigner if there were chart tools included.

 

We don't ask for a Excel replacement, but we need/want a not-stuck-in-the-past vector tool!

[Alfred]

As Patrick pointed out, you need tables to hold the data, so this is a feature which seems more likely to be added to Affinity Publisher than Affinity Designer.

[mintcar]

I second the sentiments in this thread! There surely is a big demand for this. Illustrator has unbelievably poor tools and is still the best choice for creating professional quality graphs for print. Every corporation and government body needs to put out yearly annual reports and I'm willing to bet a lot of the bigger ones hire agencies that use Illustrator to make the graphs, even though the tools in Illustrator are ridiculously dated. 

 

It really doesn't matter if it's made a part of Designer or Publisher: either way it'd be a big leg up on Adobe. 

[anon1]

mermaid is nice for graphs 

 

mermaid and markdown in publisher would be sweet 

[Mikesh]

Hello everyone!

 

It will be nice to have some charting possibilities in designer.

I'm working in economical newspapers, and we rely on illustrator due the huge amount of charts we need to do.

 

Our basic workflow is: 

Excel, OpenOffice or Google Tabs -> export data to CVS or just copy paste -> illustrator

or using some web tools like http://rawgraphs.io/ to generate svg and then back to illustrator for finishing touches.

 

Sometimes we use D3.js (https://d3js.org/) to generate our custom charts to svg and then jump to illustrator again.

I think using some library like D3 could be the way.

 

It would be great argument for us to switch to Designer if we can do some better charts than in illustrator.

 

 

[Alfred]

On 07/12/2017 at 5:05 PM, LittleM said:

It will be nice to have some charting possibilities in designer.

 

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @LittleM.

 

As you’ll see from the earlier posts to this thread, charting is more likely to be an Affinity Publisher feature.

[myerf]

I'm new to this so forgive me if I"m coming at this wrong but… I created a chart in Apple's Numbers app which I could then copy as PDF. When I 'paste as a new document' in Affinity Designer it converts all elements to vectors / text fields etc. which can be edited endlessly. Is this not a good solution?

[Fahad Javed]

Yes i would also suggest charting features in Affinity Designer. Although we can do this using smart shapes like creating multiple pie shapes and creating shapes based on data provided manually,but it is quite cumbersome. This feature will be especially quite useful for those creating Infographics or Infographic CV's. We should have the ability to generate different charts like lets say bar chart,series chart,pie chart etc. based on simple common file formats like tab delimited text,.xml and .json files(.json files are already generated by Affinity Designer for working with animation frameworks like Spine and for batch processing from the slice options in Export persona). Further more to facilitate these,we could use existing features of Affinity Designer like Symbols to assign the graphics to be added in the graphs like a node symbol and an edge symbol which would be plotted from node to node,when generating the chart or graph.

[mbrashear1]

myerf is correct. A very easy work flow looks like this:

1. Put your chart data in an Apple Numbers sheet
2. Create the graph you're needing (note: design your graph as closely to how you want it to look in Affinity Publisher)
3. Select the chart and secondary (right) click on the chart
4. Select "Copy as PDF"
5. Paste in your Affinity Publisher document

This will result in your chart and its associated text and vectors being placed in your AP doc. I have attached two screen shots that show the chart in Numbers and what it looks like when copied as PDF to AP. Each asset and text block is fully editable in AP.

[Oval]

On 12/22/2019 at 5:48 PM, mbrashear1 said:

fully editable in AP.

That is the problem, because changing data would end in endless work.

[Chapit Zulkefli]

On 3/31/2020 at 10:45 PM, Oval said:

That is the problem, because changing data would end in endless work.

i cosign. and seems likely to the date still no news for chart.

[TariqMK]

Has anything been updated/announced in this regard?

[Alfred]

6 hours ago, TariqMK said:

Has anything been updated/announced in this regard?

I can’t see this being added in version 1.x, if it’s added to Designer at all.

On 10/18/2016 at 7:46 AM, Patrick Connor said:

Adding charts well to PagePlus took over 2 man years, and that was in an application that already had tables to hold the data. Consequently this feels more like a Publisher feature request to me, or even a separate app.

 

[artokmt]

I think that best solution in this feature would be that it is Designer tool but with studiolink you can use it in Publisher too.

[Clarenburg]

Not mentioned above is the solution I came up with is working with Grasshopper. This is as visual scripting tool in Rhino3D. Rhino is, besides one of the greatest 3D nurbs modelling tools, also extremely handy for drawing 2D vectors and it imports and exports with 100% scale to illustrator. So I do all the drawing in Rhino and the coloring in Illustrator.

Grasshopper is able to connect to Excel sheets and process that data to any shapes you want and of course 3D shapes as well. For those who are interested you can follow several courses on Lynda.com or crawl youtube. On https://www.food4rhino.com/ you can find all kind of plugins for grasshopper. Me personnaly would very much like to see Affinity write such a scripting tool for graphic designers or a plugin into Rhino grasshopper.

[qewt]

On 9/7/2018 at 9:35 PM, myerf said:

I'm new to this so forgive me if I"m coming at this wrong but… I created a chart in Apple's Numbers app which I could then copy as PDF. When I 'paste as a new document' in Affinity Designer it converts all elements to vectors / text fields etc. which can be edited endlessly. Is this not a good solution?

GENIUS! I had no idea "copy as PDF" was possible. Thanks for this solution.

 

(That being said I would love a chart making option in Designer or Publisher)

[Tequejas]

Another missing feature for AD. there should be a list for those who thinks on buy the software. Yet powerful but will be easier if we see how many "comparing" features with Adobe are missing... 

[Oval]

17 hours ago, Tequejas said:

there should be a list for those who thinks on buy the software

Serif has a list online! And if this is not enough they could use https://affinity.help/ or the (90-day) trials.

[Mithel]

I'd love to see some charting / graphing features added to Affinity Designer!  I've had a real need for this.  Yes, I can make charts with a spreadsheet program but it's limited.  I want a good tool and it would be great if Affinity supplied this!