HiI would like to know wich software is the best to make state-of-the-art graphs (also 3D).I am preparing my thesis and I am using Excel, but I would like to get somethig more "graphic"!Thanks

Paolo,Try IDL from Research SystemsIDL Imageshttp://www.rsinc.com/gallery/index.asp?Product_Code=10

Depends on what you mean by 'graphic' and even what your thesis is about.B.S. aside, check out research.att.com projects->graphviz for directed graphs (think *nomial trees) so easy a drunk monkey can use it (this I know for a fact!). Its great and free. This tool has been a life saver for me more times than I know...for realistic graphs, OpenGL is good. Most likely, the learning curve/ROI is too steep for that to be of much practical use.for charting type graphs, look at -perl: PDL -matlab -visual basic has 1000's of graphing apps, so I won't belabor the point.Hope this helps!-Gluphus

on UNIX there is gnuplot callable from laTex

A possibility is www.grapl.net - take a look at that

Paolo,I often get asked the same question. The first question I have is: how much are you willing to spend if anything - and if you don't want to buy another tool, how much time do you have to tinker around!Firstly, I would suggest that you see how far you can go with Excel's built-in charting functionality - I'm constantly amazed what some people are able to achieve with it. If you decide Excel just doesn't cut it then there a lot of third-party tools out there, however not many of them stand-out. If you have access to Matlab or Maple, check those out first as they easily give you that 'publication quality' look and are relatively easy to figure out and integrate with Excel.There are many third-party Active X charting controls out there (I use ChartFX by Softwarefx.com) - however these imply VBA coding. Visual Basic's own MSChart control is terrible in terms of quality and it's object-model defies the laws of logic, I don't bother with it.If you are on a tight budget, I also encourage you to take a look at the many open-source scripting tools available such as Perl and Python. Perl and Python both have very large user communities on the web and as a result there are many specialized addons/libraries out there, with lots of support.Then there are the open-source math/stats packages such as gauss, R which probably have good graphic capabilities.B.