Question is pretty much the title, do they usually use word? publisher maybe? something adobe? And what do they use for the graphs?
I’m at a big 4 and for our valuation reports we use internaly developed Microsoft add-ins, so I’m guessing that’s how it works but curious minds want to know.
It depends on your level of skill. R is extremely versatile, but obviously there is a learning curve, so it’s not usually feasible for the average end-user. Excel has a surprising array of data display tools that are not often used, especially if you know VBA. Since almost everyone uses Excel anyway, I’d recommend making sure you’ve exhausted Excel’s functionality before purchasing another data-visualization package that will probably just mimic what you could already do in Excel. With that said, the Excel engine is horribly weak. If I’m using even a medium-sized dataset, I usually work in STATA or another statistical package, and then export the results to Excel for display purposes in business valuation or analytics report.