Note to Self, Excel Chart Edition

Lacking any better software, I do all my graphs in Excel, paste them to Paint*, then save them as .png (sometimes .tiff). This works fine on small-ish images.

Recently I want to try something that'll give a nicer resolution, just because I like pretty things, particularly pretty things that can be scaled to (at least in theory) any size without loss of quality.

Obviously, neither png or tiff are vector graphic formats. Apparently the fastest way to get a vector image out of an Excel chart is to print it as a pdf, then untangle the mess in a program that can edit these things. Messy *moue*.

I'm not sure whether I'm bored enough to play with data visualization in a CAS. Sometimes they turn out well, sometimes they don't.

Which image format(s) do people like to use on their papers?

My supervisor uses a program that is perfectly capable of producing high-resolution images. However, given that he uses Microsoft Word** for the text part of his papers, I'm not sure whether his image handling techniques will be adequate for my purposes.

*That's probably the only thing I'll certainly miss in a Mac. Ugly as it is, I like Paint; it's great for quick sketches in assignments (e.g. geometry proofs, proton NMR splitting trees).
**I tried Word 2007. The math still looks terrible.