Candidly, Illustrator chart tool should be able to do almost anything that Excel can chart. The reality of working for an in-house corporation is that the designer will be given data via MS Office, like it or not. So it's pretty unrealistic to go back to a product manager and tell them -- our Adobe software doesn't understand your data unless you change this, change that and format it this way. The alternative is to become and Excel master, so that you can prep all of your data and format it "just-so" so that Illustrator can graph it. Even then, manual workarounds are often necessary. This tool is antiquated and needs a complete overhaul. Anyone who works as a designer in the financial industry has run into these issues.

I would prefer to have the graph tool inside Illustrator.

Benefits with "inside illustrator" would be:
- easy to combine graph with illustrator objects
- easy to have same style between regular illustations and graphs
- keep the possibily to break apart a graph when special needs

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Would it make sense to have a separate desktop app, just to create charts, and bring them inside Illustrator or InDesign? It may not be on cloud.

Or would you rather have us work on building it within Illustrator?

Please share your thoughts.

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Don't even get me started with the graph tool. You improve it but only give the improvements on the cloud! WTF! The tool hasn't changed since Illustrator 5 I believe. Hard to use, can't use negative numbers on stacked charts, ability to use 2 different types of figures without making 2, connecting lines on line graphs, moving items around and having them stay there if you update the data, easier way to make styles… the improvements this tool needs is endless.

I hadn't been asked to create a graph in nearly a decade. Imagine my consternation when I discovered that the chart tool had not changed at all in all that time.

After creating a graph, it is often useful to resize it. If changing the width-height ratio, it now resizes unproportional.

It should be a way to resize a graph correctly.

The chart tool is our "go-to" method of creating bar graphs/line charts/pie charts, etc. for printed materials. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to use...at all. For example, when we are making a chart with a category axis that includes years (e.g., 2010, 2011, 2012) Illustrator automatically assumes that those are numbers to be charted unless we add quotes around them. This is an arduous process, to say the least. Also, when pasting data from spreadsheets, Illustrator refuses to draw the graph until we strip out commas between thousands. Another problem: when graphing percent, there is no where to tell Illustrator that this is a percentage. So if the spreadsheet data says 15%, Illustrator first requires that we eliminate the % sign. This means we have to convert it in the spreadsheet application, which then changes the number from 15 to 0.15. So we have to manually convert the number in the spreadsheet, then paste it back into Illustrator. A tedious workaround, to be generous. Another suggestion: please add data labels as an option. Currently, if we want a series of bars to show the data label, we have to use the type tool and add it manually. Ugh. I have been using this tool for over nine years, and the chart tool makes my job very difficult sometimes. I love Adobe CC products, but this is a LONG overdue update. Thanks!!!!

Pie Chart Graph Tool should alert user when sums do not equal 100 for numerical inputs. Currently, one can input integers that do not equal 100 and risk looking like an idiot in front of the accounting department. It is very misleading to have a complete pie that doesn't actually equal 100.