What charting/dashboarding/reporting tool would you recommend with the following requirements:
By the sounds of it you are focusing on Charts. I would have to say that SQL Reporting Services + Dundas Charts may fit the what you need, although I dont know the config options of excel, althogh I can tell you Dundas Charts are probably the most configurable I have ever seen. You can get You can get the SQL Reporting Services veriosn of them. You can download a trial as well to really see if iut fits your need. The only drawback is price. Its not cheap.
Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007. You can use cubes, standard queries (ODBC) or tabular data (spreadsheets, sql tables/views, SharePoint lists, etc.) as data sources. You can import/export Excel documents. You can publish reports to a Reporting Services server. You can publish to Share Point sites (using web parts). From what I've seen and used, it's pretty slick and sounds like it would meet/exceed your requirements.
I agree with SkullDuggerT, I've tried many different dashboarding tools and PerformancePoint fits your needs perfectly. Once you get Sharepoint, SQL Server, and your business rules setup, PerformancePoint is good to go. There is a dashboard designer which lets you integrate all of your charts and reports.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/performancepoint/default.aspx
I have a same problem. I need to create a dashboard solution for a automobile firm in which there are many type of datasources and the dashboard application should be winform based rather than web browser based. Earlier i was very keen to performancepoint server, but accordng to its documentation, it has only web browser support.Though it also has excel add-in but that is for export and also doesn't solve my purpose of winforms. Please recommend the best strategy and technologies which should be used in my case
You can use Office Web components. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7287252C-402E-4F72-97A5-E0FD290D4B76&displaylang=en
They are no longer supported but they still work in Sharepoint 2007.
The Office Web components allow you to connect to any datasource and create Excel Like Pivot tables etc.
Xtraction delivers interactive dashboards with visual charts and graphs, ability to export, from any number of data sources.
You can combine free data visualization libraries with a dashboard tool.
For example use Ms Chart Controls or Silverlight controls with Kalitte Dynamic Dashboards. Or you can use Silverlight for dashboarding and data visualization. See Dundas.
Some alternatives may be;
For pivoting & data analysis you can use office web components or Radar-Soft controls.
These are all UI side solutions. If you have large data you may need to implement a business intelligence solution. You can use Microsoft Analysis Services.
Most of the organizations prefer to use softwares like Microsoft project and visio for project management. They include all these facilities for managing and reporting projects and processes. This way it becomes easier to keep track of things and communicate it across the project teams. Microsoft's project managing software can provide you all these features.