Chart Chooser

"Use the filters to find the right chart type for your needs. Then download as Excel or PowerPoint templates and insert your data."

http://chartchooser.juiceanalytics.com/

More on Excel in-cell graphing

"We received an enthusiastic response to our post on in-cell bar graphs in Excel. The community quickly explored every edge case. I want to highlight some of the great ideas raised.

Henk was first out of the gate with a great suggestion that two columns could be used to show positive and negative values."

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/more-on-excel-in-cell-graphing/

Lightweight data exploration in Excel

"We often are given a chunk of data in Excel that we need to explore. Of course, the first tool you should pull out of your toolbox in cases like this is the trusty PivotTable (it slices, it dices!). But at times we have to dig a little deeper into the toolbox and pull out the in-cell bar chart."

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/lightweight-data-exploration-in-excel/

Contextures - Sample Spreadsheets

"Example: DV0051 - Assign Players Each Inning -- Select a player from a dropdown list, and that name disappears from the other dropdowns for that inning. "

http://www.contextures.com/excelfiles.html

Lightweight data exploration in Excel

"We often are given a chunk of data in Excel that we need to explore. Of course, the first tool you should pull out of your toolbox in cases like this is the trusty PivotTable (it slices, it dices!). But at times we have to dig a little deeper into the toolbox and pull out the in-cell bar chart."

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/lightweight-data-exploration-in-excel/

[This technique also works on OpenOffice, Google Spreadsheets, etc]

Excel Gantt Chart Template

"Easily create and print a Gantt Chart with this Excel spreadsheet by entering the start date, duration, and percent complete for any number of tasks and subtasks. Add additional tasks by copying and pasting rows. A single chart displays up to 11 months (weekends excluded). A slider bar allows you to easily adjust the range of dates displayed, so that you can create plans spanning a year or more."

http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/excel-gantt-chart.html

Clarify and Emphasise data in an Excel chart

"You can choose different options in an Excel chart to emphasize your data in different ways. For example, when you're measuring sales revenue along with number of units sold, you can add a second axis to measure a portion of values differently from another portion. Here are some examples of the different ways you can measure and display data in Excel charts."

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA010346081033.aspx

Reading and writing Excel files with Perl

"Only recently have the doors been open to Microsoft Excel, the most popular spreadsheet application for the desktop. This article takes a look at reading and writing Excel files in Windows and Linux, using Perl and a few simple modules. The author of this article, Teodor Zlatanov, is an expert in Perl who has been working in the community since 1992 and who specializes in, among other things, open source work in text parsing."

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pexcel/