I wrote a little Perl program (XFigchart.pl) that produces barcharts
in XFig format. It is easy to use, as anything that could be done in
XFig (e.g. labels) is not performed by XFigchart.pl. It simply creates
the colored bars (flat or stacked, optionally 3D with shading).
It may be helpful with making slides with LaTeX.
It is freely (GPL) available at
http://eda.ei.tum.de/~mcp/xfigchart.html