"Draw your figures in Excel" No no no no no no no! Do not draw your figures in Excel. Yes, they can be drawn quicly, but Excel figures suck, are a pain to customize and will introduce bad habits. Learn to draw figures in R using ggplot2.
I think Excel charts can be quite good. But my impression is that ggplot2 is much more flexible in what you can do with it. It's also more difficult to learn, but that's to be expected.
Learn to draw figures in R using ggplot2.