<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:3092cdf1-75ff-409e-9bdb-b4a818b39952&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Chart Advisor Overview">Video: Chart Advisor Overview</a>
Charting is one of the main strengths of Microsoft's venerable Excel spreadsheet, but with the range of options on offer, it can be hard to pick the best one (and easy to produce an over-designed chart that's high on graphics and low on usefulness). Chart Advisor, a Microsoft-developed Excel add-on, analyses your existing data and suggests the best type of chart to present the information. The product's only a prototype for now, but given Microsoft's focus in Office on "guided activities", I'd expect something similar to show up in the next release of Excel. Check out the video for more details.

Want to create a chart or graph comparing two or more options, but not so keen on digging that far into Excel or another standard spreadsheet? Tablefy offers a pretty slick interface for creating comparative charts with more than just text. You can throw YouTube videos and graphics in when needed, and entering yes/no in a cell automatically shades the cell red or green. Think of it as a My First Comparison Chart for non-spreadsheet hackers who still like to organise their thoughts into rows and columns.

Getting nutrition information from labels and fact sheets is a good start to any diet plan, but getting a handle on those abstract numbers isn't always easy. Foodsel, a free food analysis web site, offers a visual take on a wide variety of store-bought and fast foods. Using the site, one can see, for instance, that a Wendy's Homestyle Chicken Fillet Sandwich has nearly the fat content of one-third of a stick of butter, can check out a circle chart of its fat, protein, and starch content, and note that it should power an hour and 10 minutes of rock climbing (the stats pictured above are for a 12-inch Pizza Hut pizza). Foods can be searched for through a basic text box, by manufacturer, and by categories of nutrients—helpful if you were looking for, say, foods high in polyunsaturated fat and protein. For more nutri-data geekery, check out aCalorieCounter and NutritionData. Thanks Raymond!

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Got data to graph but not much in the way of spreadsheet skills? Web app Track-n-Graph gives you all kinds of bar, line, and other graphs and chart templates to use or create, as well as a simple interface for putting in the data to create them. There's a number of handy templates on the site already, including mileage and health-related trackers, and you can collaborate on your data projects with others or embed the results in a web site. A free sign-up limits you to five data projects, with unlimited use available for $25 or a single-graph upgrade for $5. For more personal project data trackers, try Morale-O-Meter or weight watcher The Google 15.

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Google's newly released chart API generates charts and graphs on the fly called by a URL with the right parameters set. The Google Blogoscoped weblog runs down what data to hand the API to get back a pie chart, line chart, bar graph and more. Don't hot-link the image on your high traffic web site, though, you only get 50,000 hits on it. Above I've used it to generate a chart of the percentage of the last 30 Google-related posts we've published here at Lifehacker by editor. Here's the live URL if you want to play with it and modify for your own purposes.