Deducer does the heavy lifting while Excel does the easy formatting.

Deducer is a great GUI head for the R statistical opensource multi-platform Java-based software.
It is free, and offers great tools to enable direct importing of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (right up to the current XLSX format). R on its own can do this with the right plugins, but Deducer makes it all very easy for those who are put off by the standard command-line interface of R.

Interactive plots are very powerful, and R-Deducer makes them very easy.

You can do some pretty neat Text mining with it too.

And something I've used recently - a Rose chart (to represent a distribution of angles between 0 and 90 degrees).

Anyway, for those of you out there that are keen on making sense of your data... for free, and the thought of a R turns you off because you're frightened of command-line driven tools, then perhaps give Deducer a go. I did, and I'm glad I did.