Help in integrating graphs/plots for research paper
So i recently switched to mint after using windows my entire life. I have always used excel and word for all types of writing. Now i am learning LaTeX. I am pretty comfortable with the text formatting and stuff so far. Now i need to include some graphs. I already have them made in my previous work and i want to import them to LaTeX.
I searched online and this are a few methods that i found.
Use excel to make graphs, export as pdf then convert it to eps. Gotta look out for formatting before export and need windows. So kind of an issue
Have the data in an xlsx/ods file. Use matplotlib to plot graphs and export as eps. Gotta learn pandas a bit but dont need windows. Can use GNUplot as well.
Use tikz. Not recommended immediately as it has a steep learning curve.
I just wanted to know if this are the only workflow people use for making papers. I just feel like this is a bit more work. I feel like word + excel copy and paste was pretty convenient. I dont have any issue in learning new stuff. This is my first time writing an actual paper for a journal. So i just want to make sure that i am not unnecessarily making my work longer. Any help is very appreciated.
Edit: Thanks again to everyone. After reading all the comments, i have decided to learn python and make graphs there. I plan to learn tikz at a later date. Thanks again. I learned quite a few things today.