I'm going to restate my question from yesterday. I'm looking for your suggestions as designers. I'm not a designer but have a good sense of typography and aesthetics, and am reasonably computer saavy. My goal is to make political infographics--mainly charts & graphs, but much more sophisticated than Excel. I want to learn a good program to do that. Are there simpler programs that would be enough, or should I learn a full featured program like Inkscape. If so, I know where to look for tutorials and help. Thanks.

depends on what you want to do
static ? dynamic ?
what do you mean by "more sophisticated" ?

http://d3js.org/ has a lot of display for your data. (You usually only need a xml of your data and off we go)

Hi.

Answer went to that post.

I would suggest to learn inkscape, a large collection of tutorials is presented here.

Naming a few of those:
Heathenx's screencast series
Xav's series in Full Circle Magazine


Or go to this page suggested by the inkscape homepage.