If you ever want to analyze data using charts , and , excel -data interaction becomes overwhelming, then one needs to write one’s own charting infra..I was in a similar position where excel based charts were not enough for my analysis. There was simply too much data to look at and hence ended up writing my own diagnostic tool using rails-postgres . Gruff a charting library for rails proved to be INVALUABLE.

Link : Gruff . However if you want a little more jazz to the graphs you can look at this link Vertical Labels

Overall, I am happy with gruff for it met my requirement. Don’t want anything fancier than what gruff can provide.