I tend to use Microsoft Excel for data munging and as long as you have the data in Excel you can get a first quick look at the structure of your data set with a variety of built in charting tools. Matplotlib is Python based so you can easily collaborate with machine learning people who are using IPython, scikitlearn, etc. I am interested physics and am more excited than ever by the idea of parallel coordinates because I think they are very powerful so drawing tools that implement parallel coordinates are important to me.