This is really just a brief rant, but why is it so hard to find a commercial presentation software package that does brilliant data graphs? PowerPoint is just…awful, and while Keynote makes purty slides, the graphs are more designed to be works of art, and not to clearly communicate a dense amount of information. Newcomers like Sliderocket show promise, but the range of charting tools isn’t quite there yet. Maybe I’ll succumb to Tufte’s advice, skip the slides and go with handouts–there is a fine line between data-rich graphs that are unreadable and data-poor graphs that are low-resolution chart junk.

What do you use?