My posting has been light for a week or so because I’ve been upgrading my commercial charting utilities. The most important upgrade has to do with RefEdit controls.

RefEdit Problems

I’ve written here about Using RefEdit Controls in Excel Dialogs, and I use them a lot because they come in handy when the user has to identify a range of cells. However, I’ve also written about an Unspecified but Painfully Frustrating Error which has been associated with these controls. This error has led to an inordinate amount of customer support to update customer installations and correct the errors.

To improve the user experience of my customers, and to cut down on customer support incidents, I’ve replaced the RefEdit controls in all of my commercial utilities with an alternative method. I will write about this RefEdit alternative soon, but in a nutshell, it looks the same in the dialog, behaves almost the same in practice, and it avoids the nasty problems that reflect poorly on my products.

Additional Enhancements

In addition to this major across-the-board modification to my products, I’ve made a few smaller enhancements.

Waterfall Chart Utility

Most of my utilities require a lot of worksheet space to achieve large, sparse data arrangements that make the charts work. Because of this, my utilities generally insert a new worksheet for this range, the necessary formulas, and the charts.

A frequent request has been to put the formulas and chart onto the same sheet as the original data. For several charts, the space required is prohibitive, so I will keep using the new worksheet approach, and let the users copy and paste the charts as desired.

However, the Waterfall Chart Utility really doesn’t need extra rows, only some blank space to the right of the original data. So I have modified the utility to place the calculations and the chart right in the active sheet. The user still has the option to use a new worksheet.

Cluster Stack Chart Utility

Some users have wondered if the Cluster Stack Chart Utility could create horizontally oriented bar charts in addition to the vertically oriented column charts in the documentation. The answer was no, until now.

I have added an option to make either horizontal or vertical clustered-stacked charts with this utility.

Box Plot Utility

A few months ago I asked you readers how best to represent the Box and Whisker Chart Median. Until that point I had simply drawn two boxes for the second and third quartiles, and left a small space between them. The gap represented the median. This approach was problematic, because it was difficult to ensure a uniform gap width. When a customer had problems because his vertical axis used a log scale, I knew I needed a new approach.

After analyzing the results of my informal survey, I went with a line to divide the interquartile box at the median. Worked well, looked nice. But a customer wanted to be able to format his two quartile boxes differently, yellow below the median and green above, and I had converted to a single box encompassing both quartiles.

Not long ago I modified the Box and Whisker Plot Utility to use two boxes for the two quartiles. The boxes use the same default fill color, but now they can be reformatted separately. There are no changes to the dialog, but I’ll show it anyway, because pictures brighten up any post, and they’re worth a thousand words, too.

To My Customers

Any customers who already have any of these utilities are welcome to upgrade, no charge. Send me an email, and I’ll send you a new download link. Any of you who are not yet customers, can reap the benefits of these improvements with a simple purchase.

Related Posts:

• Box and Whisker Chart Median Options
• Alternative to Excel’s Flaky RefEdit Control
• Cascade Chart Utility Joins the Team
• Announcing the Box and Whisker Chart Utility
• Using RefEdit Controls in Excel Dialogs
• LOESS Utility – What the Buttons Mean
• State of the Blog – Year End 2009
• Simple Box Plots
• Unspecified but Painfully Frustrating Error
• PTS Charts in Excel 2010