Super Smart Charts and Graphs: Let Excel 2007 Figure Out the Best Way to Display Your Data

We all know that Excel can make some gorgeous charts and graphs, but if you are like 30 Rock's Liz Lemon and don't know your scatter plot from your triangle graph ("I don't know. It sounded real!"), then you should let Excel analyze your data and choose the best kind of chart all on its own.

Actually, Excel will need a little help: Chart Advisor is an add-on that automatically creates charts based on your data, requiring no charting expertise from you.

It's actually pretty neat; just select a cell in your array of data, and Chart Advisor generates a number of chart options for you. Find the one you like the best and then customize it in a number of ways -- such as by easily removing sets of data you're not interested in.

This add-on is compelling because you no longer need to figure out how to marry your raw data with a logical chart -- Chart Advisor does all that for you.

Chart Advisor was developed by Microsoft Office Labs, the same folks that have given us some other cool stuff like Forgotten Attachment Detector and Email Prioritizer.