Excel is known for it’s excessive use of clutter and unnecessary “eye candy” (a.k.a as chart junk) in their default chart types. However, you can correct this with a few clicks to produce nice looking charts with at least less distracting layout. Have a look at this screencast for a quick walk-through on how to clean up the junk.
Some time ago I announced a mini-project called NanoCharts, which is an implementation of Edward Tuftes Sparklines concept. Sparklines (and NanoCharts) are basically small, word sized graphics for high density visualization of data. I have been working to make available a sort of beta release of what will eventually be an Add-in for Excel. At present I have a working version that allow the user to insert some different NanoChart types and do some simple formatting selections. The current user form looks like this:
Quite frequently there is a need to display custom lables in a standard Excel XY-plot. Unfortunately Excel lack a native function to insert custom labels; the only options available are Series names, x- and y-values which often are totally inappropriate. I created a workbook with a macro that allows the user to insert the X and Y data along with the desired lables and create a labled scatter plot with the click of a button. See image below.