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A point I have not seen mentioned is that Excel encourages bad practices for data visualization. No other statistics or data analysis software I am aware of gives you the option of 3D-ifying a 2D plot. This adds negative value to the plot for anyone who is actually interested in data over eye candy. Simple example is a pie chart. Give it depth and it becomes much more difficult to reason about, and one's reasoning could easily change if the chart was rotated.

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Agreed for the most part, although there are rare valid uses for 3d graphs. I think most contemporary data vis people would say that Excel makes it possible to make pie charts at all means it may encourage bad practices.

What are those rare valid uses for 3D graphs?

I can think of one-- we had a 96-element datatable (12x8) and limited space in our biochemical journal article. We were looking to graphically show differences in orders of magnitude to help explain the assay. A 3d column chart fit the bill because we could show lots of data in a small space, and readers could quickly see the range of values.

I was hesitant about the pie chart example but it was the simplest I could think of. I'm glad someone brought this up. ;)

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