Heh. "And crap in."

(Sorry.)

I use (and love) Graphpad's Prizm. I think there's a trial version that can be dled from that site. The full program is only a few megabytes.

gnuplot, definitely

Excel, if you have MS office available. If you don't: OpenOffice.

If you need help, gimme a shout. Im an spreadsheet God for my sins of which i have many.

MS Word is both a reasonably easy graph generator, and a good place to crap in. It's also pretty ubiquitous.

1) Insert - > Picture - > Chart
2) Chart - > Chart Type - > Line
3) Update variables
4) Crap
5) Profit

Not the best, but like I said, pretty ubiquitous. And good to crap in.

MS Word is OK, for me to poop on! No seriously, it's drivin me nuts, so I'll try one of these other programs.

Fair warning, Triumph - if you don't like charts in Word, you ain't gonna like charts in Excel. The others might do it for you, though.

Im neither a MS advocate or an MS shitsticker, but Excel has performed perfectly for me in the last year (Ive not yet needed to find an alternative.) That you can produce linked presentations with (i know, i know) Powerpoint has been the best work efficientive (sic) that ive found this year. Cut my workload by about 80%. I have to produce 4 monthly reports with a total of about 50 charts, 10 tables and assorted commentary. It helps that the presentation now updates itself from the change in data rather than have to update the presentation with that change. Just saying...

ive never tried to produce a chart in Word when Excel is built for the purpose.

Excel is ok for simple stuff.

If you need more options, or want to produce camera-copy, either Sigmaplot or Origin are the Photoshop of Scienceworld.

The easiest thing for me to produce graphs in is Mathematica. But most people think I'm crazy, and Mathematica is crazy expensive (unless your school has it). I can't use anything else anymore.

Gnuplot is not particularly easy to pick up (although it's not super hard), and it actually produces some of the best looking graphs.

I think Excel/Word are easy, but make ugly graphs. Customizing the graph, however, is hardest in Excel and Word.

Illustrator?

Paint.

illustrator-- if you have it.

Ahhhhhh, ALT key turns off the friggin snap mode in Word! HUZZAH!!!!
I still hate it.

gnuplot. It is command-line driven, be aware, but easy to use.

If you're graphing data, R has good built in graphing capabilities.

If you're graphing statistical results, you can do that nicely enough in R, or Stata, or most stats packages. I think that GRETL will do that too, but ISTR that it works through gnuplot so you might have to install that first.

gnuplot and R are free but don't hold your hand very much.

another vote for mathematica or excel