Love some of the ideas you are working with at this point and have money earmarked for a panel chart utility. I just spent most of the day building some panel charts (hadn’t done one in awhile and lost my previous template due to a HD failure) and a utility to build these out quickly would be a tremendous time saver. Also I am very interested in the Chart Advisory Wizard. As I stated in one of your blog reviews of 2007 charting – I like most people hate the new chart interface. Personally, it would bring me great joy to drop quick all of 2007’s charting except the better colors with something that could actually get work done like 97 – 2003. BTW in the office, plans are to skip 2007 due to the Excel issues. Microsoft is leaving behind the entire financial services industry, which will stay with 2003 if they don’t get the next version fixed. Feel free to pass along to any of the Microsoft powers that be that the power users of Excel in Finance are none to pleased and don’t want or expect to be treated like grandmother making out her grocery list.

“…where do I get hold of earlier versions of excel…”

For you it’s easy. As an MVP you have an MSDN license, which grants you access to scads of software, which you can use as part of the MSDN license as long as it’s used for development. (And I’d call writing your blog development: development of educational materials.) I don’t know how far back it goes, because there were some concessions made to Sun regarding all that Java stuff, but I think that affects Windows versions, not Office.

For others, well, I’m sure there’s an elephant’s graveyard of old CDs and DVDs somewhere. I wonder if anyone’s unloading anything like that on EBay?

Thanks for the converted movie. And yes, you could program that behavior into the chart selection tool. You could calculate which series pass through the selected rectangle, then change the formatting of those series.

Now I’m being a real pain, but is there a version of that video which does not use Quicktime? I refuse to install that POS on any more of my machines. Microsoft may be evil, but Apple is no less so.

Joe -

I’ll have to put that on the back burner. It’s a worthwhile chart type, but people aren’t familiar yet with it. Maybe when I get finished or bored with the rest of this list.

I found this lengthly tutorial: http://www.exceluser.com/explore/bullet.htm

Your advice to Chandoo about programming for others is excellent. I know that I spent a lot of time working up the data validation in a recent add-in that I posted on my blog. Still, I missed a couple of important things that never would have been a problem if it was just for my own use. It is very easy to code an add-in that will only be used by myself or a limited audience. It is much more difficult to code for users that you don’t know personally.

Yep, a panel chart utility is also in the works. This is pretty complicated, though, and I haven’t had much time to set it up.

The trick for multiple time series was covered last week in Plot Two Time Series With Different Dates.

The X axis scale labeling can be done with a dummy series and data labels. I suppose I could do something along those lines, but I’d try to make it flexible so it could handle X or Y axes, primary or secondary, and any generic scale someone would want. That’s kind of like boiling the ocean, though.

Nixnut -

I guess I’m not sure what you mean by brushing, do you mean highlighting the points within the selected region? That could certainly be one of the preprogrammed actions.