who knows an alternative for ms-excel? which software is using for plotting data in scientific papers usually ?
The Statistical Package for Social sciences SPSS can do most of the things especially in scientific research analysis.
Google Forms is free and works much like MS Excel, including producing charts. GraphPad is a pretty good stats program that emphasizes beautiful graphing. As Abiodun points out, SPSS is probably the most popular stats program for scientific papers, with R catching up (R also has graphing capabilities). I personally use SPSS for stats and prepare graphs in Excel. Excel graphs are a bit counter-intuitive for scientists, but prettier than SPSS and with practice you’ll have an enormous amount of control over qualities of the figures. Best wishes with your project, Amirreza. ~ Kevin
Find out the package your co-authors and people in your department use. This is an important consideration because no matter what package you use you will likely have questions and often it is easiest to ask someone in person.
I use EXCEL, SPSS and R to create graphs. I use R to create graphs for scientific articles/papers. For production purposes, I use SPSS to produce the data/tables and use VBA to paste this information into EXCEL and WORD. I produced 1000's of reports using SPSS, EXCEL, WORD and VBA. R lets you control more aspects of a graph. In second place comes EXCEL. SPSS is harder to control, but with GPL you can go a little further, but is harder to learn. R is harder to learn, but it will pay off and there are good books on R packages for creating graphs (ggplot2 and lattice).
I addition to the excellent solution of Peter Moorer I recommend Pandas, the python package for analysis, and Matplotlib with Seaborn for graphing.
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