There are many free and paid for data visualization programs and tools. Here are some of the more commonly used programs/tools.
Microsoft Excel
Tableau
Excel is perhaps one of the most commonly used data visualization tools and particularly useful for its ability to organize and manipulate datasets so that they can be used for visualization. Pivot tables in particular
Power View Addon for Excel - Power View is an addon in Excel that allows for interactive data exploration and visualization beyond the capabilities of Excel itself. It is a feature of Microsoft Excel 2013, and of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and 2013 as part of the SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server Enterprise Edition. This link gives an overview as to the types of charts and graphs you can create using this tool.
Tableau is currently one of the emerging data visualization specific tools out there that brings the ease of drag-and-drop and a graphical interface to data visualization. Most of us probably have some familiarity with creating charts and graphs in Excel. Well Tableau offers a way to bring Excel-file datasets (.xls), as well as many other file formats, into an easy-to-use visualization environment where you can choose to explore your data or create finished visualizations for whatever final product you are looking to create (printed poster, interactive dashboard for a web browser, etc).
Different flavors of Tableau:
Licensing status of Tableau Desktop at OSU
Tutorials
http://selection.datavisualization.ch/ - This website lists 55 different data visualization tools that cover those that involve programming and nonprograming (you can filter tools based on this aspect).