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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I’ve reached a milestone of sorts with my blog. I’ve been posting now for about four weeks, and here are my stats (not including this post): 

When I started, it took a couple of days for people to start finding my blog and responding with comments. The spambots took longer to find the blog, and for [...]

My daughter’s got a dentist appointment now, so I’ll try to whip off a quick post while sitting in the waiting room.
While looking up a topic on Charley Kyd’s ExcelUser.com site, I stumbled across his historical article The First Dashboard Used in Spreadsheets. This sample dashboard is so old, it predates Excel*. Charley presented it [...]

Welcome to the PTS blog. I’m Jon Peltier, host of the blog and owner of Peltier Technical Services. I develop utilities for Excel, dealing with automation and with data processing and display. I have an extensive web site with lots of pages about Excel, particularly charting and programming.
I’ve started this blog so I can show [...]