It doesn't matter if you're making charts for a presentation or for your banker, Adrenaline Charts Pro 1.5 lets you produce the best-looking graphics of any charting program I've ever tried.
I started working with the program, the way most computer users do, without even a sideways glance at the user guide. Because the program supports drag-and-drop into its workspace, I tried dragging an Excel 98 file into it. Nothing happened. Then I invoked the Open or Import commands to open an Excel file. No dice. Then, when I simply copied the data from an Excel file onto the Clipboard and pasted it into Charts Pro's workspace, a three-dimensional chart using multiple colors appeared. Bingo, instant chart. Of course, you'll get more out of Charts Pro 1.5 if you take a few moments to read the slender user guide. Even better, take another five minutes and work through the tutorial. When you're finished, you'll feel like a charting expert.
Charts Pro's workspace is surrounded by toolbars, not unlike those in a traditional graphics program, that lets you manipulate any of the 23 built-in charts. Tired of pie charts? How about a bagel chart? That's a three-dimensional pie chart, with a hole in the center. An Appearance palette that includes controls for transparency, tiling, and rotation controls each chart's look and feel. I especially like the program's Walls feature, which lets me create solid, semi-solid, and even transparent chart backgrounds.
You can customize charts using your own 3D objects, and Charts Pro will scale them according to the provided data. If you want to spruce them up even more, you can apply any image--or video clip--as a texture map on the background or any chart element. If you need your chart to be dimensionally accurate, the program formats your charts in pixels, inches, centimeters, points, or picas. It does all this using an interface that's straightforward and intuitive and produces results that will make even the greenest charter look like a pro.
Charts Pro's extensive Export capabilities let you save your charts as high-resolution Adobe Photoshop (as well as 3dMF, EPSF, PICT, QuickTime, and TIFF) files, and includes support for layers. The program also supports AppleScript, which allows you to automate any of the chart-creation processes. The program's Animation Settings control panel gives you access to Transition and Forecasting modules that let you create charts that move or do the Macarena. These QuickTime movies can easily be imported into a Microsoft PowerPoint or Macromedia Director presentation.
Charts Pro 1.5 is a Mac-only product, and the version I tested was designed for Power Macintosh. It's specifically enhanced and optimized for the G4's Velocity Engine capabilities to provide fast rendering and real-time manipulation, but even with my 300MHz G3 computer, all of the changes and gyrations happened plenty fast. A demo can be downloaded from Adrenaline Software.
