A frequently asked question is “How do I hide the red X close button on the corner of a VBA user form?”
My answer is that you shouldn’t hide the red button, since the user knows what it does, or at least what it’s supposed to do. Leave the button in place as an obvious way [...]

Update (11 April): It’s been a week since I switched hosting companies, and aside from some minor start up issues, the web site and the blog have been performing admirably.
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It’s been a full week since my hosting company “upgraded” my account, and the blog is still intolerably slow. They supposedly are adding MySQL server boxes [...]

In my last post, Secondary Axes in Charts, I described an essay by Stephen Few in which he concluded that secondary axes provide no benefit to good infographics. I have come to the same conclusion myself: secondary axes are more likely to confuse and obscure the data, than to clarify relationships in the data.
In the [...]

Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge writes about primary and secondary axis scales in the March 2008 Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter.
In this month’s essay, entitled Dual-Scaled Axes in Graphs-Are They Ever the Best Solution?, Stephen asks
Is it ever appropriate to include two quantitative scales on a single axis (Y or X) of a graph? Do dual-scaled [...]

From Ross at Methods in Excel, in “Microsoft, you just don’t get office developers don’t you?“

VBA Macro Person
I don’t know what’s more disturbing, the insulting tone, or the fact that They Don’t Get It. I haven’t moved to dot-net because in four years I’ve had exactly two potential clients ask me to develop something in [...]

Update (11 April): It’s been a week since I switched hosting companies, and aside from some minor start up issues, the web site and the blog have been performing admirably.
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This blog has been loading excruciatingly slowly since Saturday morning. My hosting company just transitioned me to a new “platform”, which is an improvement in most [...]

A few days ago, in Arranging Charts in a Grid, I posted a VBA procedure that arranged all the chart objects on a worksheet into a regular grid. This is pretty nice, but it arranges the charts left to right, then top to bottom, based on the Z stacking order of the charts. If you [...]

I laughed, I cried, I nearly wet my pants reading this old post on the codeulate blog:
F*cking programming

Update (11 April): It’s been a week since I switched hosting companies, and aside from some minor start up issues, the web site and the blog have been performing admirably.
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So I’m partially back in business. After getting no help over the phone support and no responses to my increasingly irate emails, I finally received an [...]

One effective way to present charts is to array them on a worksheet. You can lay them out manually, and even line them up nicely: by holding ALT while dragging and resizing charts, you constrain them to stick to the grid of cell boundaries.
However, if you have a lot of charts, this is tedious. I’ve [...]