Hmm, there is obviously not any out there. I tried many of them. I actually battled all of them. All suck. Big times. But there is gnuplot. It’s cross plattform, which is not a bad thing if you are working at a research facility. It’s not as easy as other programs, because you need to input commands in shell to get a plot. But this is also the biggest advantage of gnuplot.

So gnuplot is perfect if you make a lot of calculations or experiments and have a lot of data to process – you just write a script and load it into gnuplot and you get all plots. Save them in many different file formats (png, gif, ps, latex, …). No hundreds of clicks every time for one plot. You can even have publication quality plots if you invest more time though origin might be a better choice here.

Actually, did I mention that it’s free?

There is also a nice website out there, which has a lot of tips and tricks, the not so Frequently Asked Questions about Gnuplot Website.