Since it does not have to hijack palette tiles for its colors, I presume that the Chart Tamer just uses the colors it wants, and leaves the defined theme colors alone.

I have also written a review of this, over at http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/05/04/review-chart-tamer/

Excel’s default choices for color palette never made much sense to me, and Excel’s native charting options include lots of bad charts and poor default settings for the purposes of data visualization. Chart Tamer does a nice job of providing an alternative, with reasonable and well explained defaults for data visualization, and a nice tool for customizing one’s Chart Default colors — provided one can live with Chart Tamer’s recommended palette (with only 4 empty spots for your custom colors, which seem likely to be a few colors one is used to having available from Excel’s default palette).

Chart Tamer’s three new chart types — “that aren’t currently available in Excel: dot plots, strip plots, and box plots” — are useful, yet still a tad disappointing. Unlike Jon’s creative dot plots, the Chart Tamer dot plots are just nicely formatted line plots (with filled circles and no lines). Not so hard to do yourself with categories on the X axis, but use Jon’s Dot Plotter add-in if you want to do it with categories on the Y axis. The Chart Tamer strip plots resemble Minitab dotplots, using a simple trick that I hadn’t thought of using, with N series of dots of the same color to show the distribution for each X category. Unlike Jon’s Box & Whisker Plot, the Chart Tamer box plots require the input to be *your* 3-number or 5-number data summaries — curiously ordered as { Max, Q3, Q1, Min, Median } — or whatever estimators you’d like to use! — rather than the raw data. No outlier detection (Tukey fences) like Jon’s utility, though.

In summary, BonaVista Chart Tamer is a innovative Excel add-in that brings Excel a lot closer to contemporary/minimalist standards for charting data, instead of “business as usual”. The three extra chart types are useful, especially for those who aren’t already using Jon’s Excel utilities (or relying on Minitab for graphical data analysis). BonaVista will get my $39.

Box plots and dot plots and harnessing the power of Excel’s charts and color paletta to focus on the data instead of the decorations? I love it.

As a recent adopter and raving fan of BonaVista’s MicroCharts for Excel, I have been meaning to check out their latest Excel toolkit. From their product documentation and your review, it sounds like this add-in effectively promotes the vision of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few for more information rich graphics with fewer distractions.

Thank you for building such an information rich website!

Dale W.

It is possible to change the colors used by Chart Tamer, and you can always reformat a chart independent of the utility. Chart Tamer uses the default Excel font as far as I’ve noticed.

I don’t understand your point. The charts made by Chart Tamer are true Excel charts, just with cleaner formatting. You can add or remove data and other chart elements as with any Excel chart. If the problem is that you need a more complicated chart, you can use Excel’s regular charting mechanisms, or you can start with a Chart Tamer chart. Also, it may be wise to review your chart design, because often a complicated chart is one that is trying to do too much, and all it does is spread confusion.