I have a TON of bar charts to create in illustrator (each with 10 or so different categories). IE lots of data to plug in. I want them all to look the same, I want to color them, have them sized correctly, etc… I am finding that the bar chart tool in illustrator is not so great. Do any of you use a different graphics program to create bar charts and then import the graphics into illustrator? Help please! (tight deadline)
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I’ve never found anything better than Illustrator for creating one-off charts and graphs. If you’re mass-producing the things with all the information stored in a database, Tableau can automatically generate all kinds of data visualization graphics, but Tabeau isn’t really ideal for print, although it’s doable via PDF.
Nice ! 
As much as I hate to suggest it, there’s also Canva.
I’ve made really nice graphs in Excel - you can then export that to PDF.
Open the PDF up in Illustrator and assign the colors.
There’s also this plugin - Chart Maker plug-in for Illustrator | Datylon
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