Edward Tufte (on the link) says:
"Now and then some of my students have been able to hack Excel to do good graphics. But for serious data analysis and publishable graphics, use a high-end statistics package such as Origin 6.0 (good review in Science, July 16, 2000; Windows only, reads into Adode Illustrator); SYSTAT; Datadesk; STATA; SAS; SPSS; SigmaPlot; or the like. All these programs will give you excellent data analysis and statistically competent displays more or less suitable for scientific publication or serious presentations.
For the highest level graphics (elegant, custom, expensive), enter the crunched data or the graphical output into Adobe Illustrator. Or have all your graphical templates designed and set up in Illustrator. This program gives complete control over typography, line weight, color, grids, layout--just what we need for doing graphical work. It is a serious, complex design program; you may want to work with real graphical designers who will surely know their way around Illustrator. The graphics for the medical interface in my book Visual Explanations (pages 110-111) were done first by scaling the medical data with custom software, and then those statistical results were brought into Adobe Illustrator to produce the complex data/image display on page 111. The output from Illustrator is directly publishable.
More generally, set up a few really good templates for tables and graphics. Use these really good architectures for everything you can. Also when you see excellent graphics, find out how they were done. Borrow strength from demonstrated excellence. The idea for information design is: Don't get it original, get it right."
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