Excel and Charting Goods and Services

There are a lot of products and services related to Excel and to charting, and it's hard to know much about them. Below is a vastly incomplete list of those products and services which I know to be worth the time and money. I don't list things just because I got an email from some web site. See my Excel Books page for a similar list of books, and my pages of links to good Excel and charting resources around the web.

Workshops, Conferences, and Classes

Visual Business Intelligence Workshops
Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge held his first public workshop in June 2007, in San Francisco, CA. The public workshop was a great success, and there are plans to hold two such workshops in 2008: Boston in June and San Francisco in October. Stephen is unique in his approaches that integrate physiological and psychological theories of perception and cognition into practical techniques for effective display of information. Anyone who uses Excel or any of the many other business productivity tools will learn how to use them productively. Three all-day classes are offered at the workshops:

      Table and Graph Design for Effective Communication
      Dashboard Design for at-a-Glance Monitoring
      Visual Data Analysis for Discovery and Understanding

Excel User Conference
The Excel User Conference is held several times per year at a variety of venues. The conference includes intermediate and advanced sessions on using Excel, and half-day classes on advanced topics are held by experts. Upcoming conferences include Atlantic City (September 24-27, 2007). At the Atlantic City Excel User Conference, I will be offering two half-day classes: Advanced Excel Charting, and Charting with VBA.

Utilities and Add-Ins

General Utilities

ASAP Utilities is a powerful Excel add-in that fills the gaps in Excel and automates frequently used tasks.

John Walkenbach's Power Utility Pak is the award-winning Excel add-in that provides lots of new features and custom worksheet functions.

Rob Bovey's Excel Utilities is a set of 30 of the most useful enhancements which are lacking in Excel.

Jan Karel Pieterse's Name Manager provides a vastly improved interface to manage defined names in your workbooks.

Jan Karel Pieterse's Autosafe improves on Excel's AutoSave utility by regularly saving a copy of all open workbooks in a different directory without overwriting the original. I've relied upon deleted backups in the Recycle Bin as a version history.

Charting Utilities

Rob Bovey's XY Chart Labeler, a free and absolutely must have add-in available from Applications Professionals. This utility integrates seamlessly into Excel and lets you easily apply labels from worksheet cells as data labels to points in a chart, and move the labels with pinpoint precision.

John Walkenbach's Chart Tools, a free add-in that fits smoothly into Excel and allows labeling of data points, resizing of multiple charts, exporting of charts to image files, and more.

Programming Utilities

MZTools has a single goal: To make your everyday programming life easier. I can attest that it meets this goal.

Rob Bovey's Code Cleaner, a free add-in available from Applications Professionals which simplifies cleanup of VBA projects by exporting forms and modules, saving the stripped project, and re-importing the forms and modules. It may reduce file size, but the major benefit is removal of partially compiled scraps of VBA from the project.

Stephen Bullen's Smart Indenter, which tidies up your VBA code modules by rebuilding the indentation of each line according to your preferences.

Stephen Bullen's VBE Tools contains a number of nice enhancements for the VBA programming environment.