Sigma Plot Fail

I've been using Sigma Plot to make all the graphs for my papers but I recently discovered that my license expired and I can no longer run the program.  The license is held by my work so I asked the IT guy to look into it - hopefully he can fix it.  If not I'll be remaking all my graphs in Origin because for some reason my company has (had??) licenses for both Sigma Plot and Origin.  I'm just hoping it will all get resolved soon. 

Origin vs Sigma Plot

Poll time! Which do you use for making your publication-ready graphs/charts/tables: Origin or Sigma Plot?

I honestly haven't made much progress in my paper writing though I have finished off one of the grants already. What I have done however, is assemble a bunch of data that I can turn into publication-ready figures...as soon as I figure out which software to use.

This would look good in a paper...right?*

My advisor uses Sigma Plot, a co-worker uses Origin. At this point I'm leaning towards Origin because they have a student version that I could purchase for $50/year. I didn't see a student version for Sigma Plot, in fact the cheapest version I saw was $499 (ouch!). Ideally work would get me a license for creating publication quality figures but at this point I'm going to assume that I will be footing the bill.

So, what should it be: Origin or Sigma Plot?

*Not actual data. I know it looks good (ha) but I really made this in Paint in less than five minutes.


UPDATE (6/14/2011):  I've had some time to use both Sigma Plot and Origin now (my Sigma Plot license expired any my company decided not to renew it) and I wanted to give some more information that someone will hopefully find helpful.  I've only created very basic graphs with both software, graphs one could create in Microsoft Excel but look better in professional software.

I found Sigma Plot easier to use right off the bat.  I was able to copy and paste my MS Excel data into Sigma Plot and create a graph within a matter of minutes without reading the manual - pretty awesome.  When it came time to stack graphs, make a secondary axis, add error bars, etc. I had to pull out the manual and found the process rather painful.

Origin I could not use without reading the manual.  Time consuming and tedious, it took me a ridiculous amount of time to get my data in Excel and an even longer amount of time to figure out how to plot on the secondary axis.  Origin isn't all bad - once I got the hang of it, Origin was really simple to use.