Imitating MS Excel Charts

[devangel]

Hi Dave/Richard,

Its really very nice to work with JFreeCharts. Great Job.

I want to know, whether JFreeChart can imitate all types of charts which are available in MS Excel.

So that, I can explore JFreeChart a lot and get my job done.

[RichardWest]

Its really very nice to work with JFreeCharts. Great Job.

Thanks. This is David's project. I am merely a contributor.

I want to know, whether JFreeChart can imitate all types of charts which are available in MS Excel.

So that, I can explore JFreeChart a lot and get my job done.

I highly doubt that JFreeChart can imitate all the charts that you can create with Excel since the developers at Microsoft keep adding newly supported chart types with every release. I would say that many of the chart types you can create with Excel are the same fundamental chart but with differing cosmetics (a pyramid chart vs. a cylinder chart vs. a standard bar chart). Excel also has a greater variety of three-dimensional chart types, but the vast majority of these are cosmetic niceties only and serve no other practical use. Almost all three-dimension charts people create can be redrawn as a two-dimensional plot without sacrificing any information.

JFreeChart does have some advantages over Excel though. Microsoft Excel is a proprietary application, so you are not able to tweak it to suit your needs as easily. For example: unless you are really competent with macros (few are), you will always have to perform the same manual labor to create a chart that meets your specific demands each time the data changes. With JFreeChart, you can create a set of custom classes and reuse them each time you wish to create a chart that meets your needs. With those custom classes you can control minuet details, such as tooltips, that you would not be able to with Excel. Your custom charts can also be embedded into any Java application you desire to write without having to worry about a proprietary API. Having said all that, the main advantage of using JFreeChart for me is that I am not restricted to "small" datasets of 256 columns by 65536 rows.

The easiest way to explore what JFreeChart can offer is to download the demo application and run it. Each chart in the list highlights one or more features of JFreeChart and what can be customized. The source code for the demos comes free with the purchase of the JFreeChart Developer's Guide.