BonaVista Systems, the maker of MicroCharts 3 sparkline* software for Microsoft Excel and for Microsoft Analysis Services, has announced an Excel Dashboard Competition. The competition is for the best real-world Excel dashboard: supply your own data (suitably obfuscated, of course) and generate a dashboard using only Excel and MicroCharts 3.
*Sparklines are small (word-sized) but information-dense [...]

Dynamic ranges (or “Names”) are commonly used to identify a range of the appropriate length, so that a chart will plot the right number of points. For example, you may want to plot year to date sales, without blanks for the months which are still in the future. The dynamic range uses COUNT or similar [...]

Whenever I am faced with a 3D chart I think of the song lyric I’ve used as the title of this post, taken from Pardon Me by Incubus. I also think of the following chart, which was submitted by thiswasmyclone to the b3ta challenge: graphs. (I didn’t add a hyperlink, because I didn’t want to [...]

On infrequent occasions I take my show on the road and offer classes on advanced charting techniques. If I am taking part in an Excel User Conference, for example, I will usually offer a couple classes. There are two classes in particular that I like to present, and that participants rate highly:

Advanced Charting Techniques
Excel Charting [...]

I recently read Pro Excel 2007 VBA, written by Jim DeMarco and published by Apress. Not another book on Excel VBA, you may say, and I must admit I was thinking along those lines myself. But this book manages to find a space in the crowded field. The author came to Excel VBA via Access [...]

Back in 2005, the first Excel User Conference was held in Fort Worth, Texas. This was an offshoot of the Excel-G and Excel-L mailing list communities, and was organized by Microsoft Excel MVP Damon Longworth. It was a great success with attendees coming from around the country and around the world. On my way to [...]

The Freakonomics blog interviewed Sabermetrics founder Bill James, in Bill James Answers All Your Baseball Questions. Bill James has been educating and entertaining us with his statistics-based observations about baseball for three decades. Baseball has always been surrounded by statistical analysis, but Mr James has been driven by a need to understand the game [...]

The PTS Blog has moved. The address is the same (after a little monkeying about in the settings) but the hosting company is new. The new host has had no issues with the MySQL, PHP, or other alphabet soup required for administration and service of a dynamic blog or web site. Ironically, the old hosting [...]

April 2nd marks the fourth anniversary of the start of my career as full time Excel developer. In my previous life I was a metallurgist, doing research into aerospace materials, but the company I was with was faltering after an ill-advised merger and a subsequent near-merger that sapped its spirit. I took a new job [...]