I'm a graphic designer for a corporation and I regularly make charts, pie, line, bar graphs...etc. I've been using illustrator to make them, but how do i make charts like this..? I know how to make them look like that but not the "efficient" way that can be updated.
If I am not mistaken the example you posted can be done in Numbers (iWork)… Makes beautiful charts and graphs for me — "efficiently".
No spreadsheet application can approach the quality of charts that you can make by hand using Illustrator. For this, you should use a dedicated charting application. The dedicated charting application that meets your needs is DeltaGraph.
Basically, it's iWork. That is what the creator of that chart used. You can get a demo from http://www.apple.com/iwork/ Here is a fictional chart I prepared with it:
My wife teaches statistics, and I've considered building her an AIR application that constructs bar charts from data input. Seems like it would be fairly straightforward to set up using an XML document as the data source.
Thanks. My boss likes the 3D effect, but it's hard to update with the method I'm using right now. I'll try iwork and if I like it, they'll have to buy it for me.