Comment from Bob
Time: Thursday, October 8, 2009, 12:20 pm

Way to go Jon.

Can’t wait to play with this.

Cheers,

Bob

Comment from Jerry Betz
Time: Thursday, October 8, 2009, 1:52 pm

Jon,

Ayuh, wicked gorgeous. Many thanks.

Jerry

Comment from Kurt
Time: Thursday, October 8, 2009, 3:00 pm

Hi Jon,

tried your LOESS-Tool, it installs a Menu
“PTS Charts” in my Excel 2003. clicking this
menu I have *two* indentical menu-entries
“LOESS”

Do you have any hint, what mistake I made?

thanks

Kurt

Comment from Bob
Time: Thursday, October 8, 2009, 5:24 pm

Hi Jon,

The same thing happened to me in Office 2007 SP2 and all the patches.

Works fine. I also have the error bar utility you cooked up for Excel 2007. Happy camper.

Thanks for your hard work.

Cheers,

Bob

Comment from Kurt
Time: Friday, October 9, 2009, 12:27 pm

Jon,

the sugested procedure did not work for me.anyway it is just a “cosmetic” thing.
thanks for making this tool available for free

Kurt

Comment from Stephen Hughes
Time: Monday, October 12, 2009, 8:40 am

Is there a minimum version of Excel needed to run this? I’ve got 97 but get a ‘Compile Error in Hidden Module: M_LOESS’ error when I try to run it.

Any suggestions would be appreciated as I need a program to smooth out experimental data.

Comment from Stephen Hughes
Time: Monday, October 12, 2009, 10:33 am

Hi Jon,

Anything you can manage would be appreciated! Meanwhile I’ll try (again) to persuade my boss of the benefits of having a modern computer and up-to-date software!

Comment from Omair Noor
Time: Thursday, December 17, 2009, 8:14 pm

Hi Jon,

I have approximately 2400 data points per column. I tried to use your LOESS utility function, but i get the following error:

Run-time error ‘6′:

Overflow.

Any idea how should i be going about resolving this problem.

Thanking in anticipation.

Comment from tom
Time: Friday, January 29, 2010, 6:24 pm

I also experienced the runtime error.
Does it have to do with very small alpha values? I chose 20 points out of 2000.

bug #2:
The utility crashes from the menu if Excel is opened without any workbook.

bug #3:
Sometimes the dialog disappears when I am entering ranges in the text boxes.

idea:
Could you add something like a auto-fit for columns in the tool. I rather would like
to add full columns. The utility could start the range below the last text row and
would end the range before the first empty cell.

Comment from Nick
Time: Sunday, January 31, 2010, 8:22 pm

Hi Jon!
Nice little utility you have here! I’m utterly hopeless at math and I have a report involving normalizing microarray data, which requires me to apply LOESS to some data. I have trouble following your example of plotting LOESS for anomaly data for NASA. There are seven choices for entering the data and I don’t know which to choose! If you give a step by step instruction of how you used the add in, it would be great.
Please help the mathematically crippled biologist!

Comment from K Hayhoe
Time: Thursday, April 15, 2010, 12:50 pm

any chance of a Mac versions for this and all your other great add-ins, pleeease?

Comment from david
Time: Wednesday, June 9, 2010, 11:37 am

Hi John,

I’m also attempting to run your loess app on some microarray data. I’m not certain if it’s working properly or not. My data consists of ~385k values (I can break into subsets of 2 30k and 2 150k).

I’m using the “3 adjacent column” button. When I hit it, the task manager says Excel is not responding. I’ve experienced this before with large data sets (this one is a smaller one for me), analysis and Excel. So I walk away — after a 1/2 hour it’s still not responding — with either the 30k, 150k or the 380k.

Should I wait longer??

Thanks

Excel 2007
Windows XP, x64 SP2
Dell Precision T5500, 2.27ghz, 24g RAM

Comment from DD
Time: Wednesday, June 23, 2010, 1:27 pm

Can’t get this to work at all in Excel 2007.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Go to Add-Ins and select “PTS Charts => LOESS”
2. Choose the button in the lower right (four columns)
3. Select 270 values for X
4. Select 270 next to it for Y
5. Do the same for output (other columns)
6. Type “0.25″ in the alpha box (Number of points updates to 67)
7. Press OK

Result is X output empty and Y output containing the same value repeated 270 times.
I can pick any data, and this is always the result.

Comment from david
Time: Tuesday, June 29, 2010, 4:46 pm

Hi John,

Thanks for your excellent reply, and please accept my apology for my delayed response.

Yes, it’s many data points, but it’s actually a small data set for us (thus the use of Excel). I’ve some data sets that contain ~3 million data points, and yes a standard first pass is to do LOESS.

It would be nice to have a LOESS function in Excel — it’s more familiar and comfortable to some folks around here — rather than R. That’s why we were excited to come upon your solution. We do have some other ~20-30K datasets (and the above that I mentioned), but trusting Excel and XP to 30 minutes (or longer) of stable computing does seem to be living to close to edge for me!

Thanks for your excellent and informative blog.

David

Comment from DanF
Time: Saturday, July 10, 2010, 5:42 pm

I particularly like the remember last use feature.

However, after a half day of LOESSing all over the place, I can’t get the utility to work any longer. When I click the x input range, I get the normal selection box. When I try to put a y range in or click any of the input buttons or text boxes, it goes poof and the LOESS window closes. When I close Excel (thinking that a good old fashioned close it-open it sequence is the cure-all for just about anything), I get the password requests. I read your REF CTL commentary, but I didn’t see what I might have done to cause LOESS to go on strike.

Comment from Thomas Rand-Nash
Time: Thursday, July 22, 2010, 11:40 am

First and foremost, THANK YOU!! This is coming in incredibly handy for smoothing out an unruly data horde! My question has to do with an “PTS_LOESS Password” box which opened after I quit excel. Is there a password I should know?
Thanks

Comment from Nate
Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010, 12:52 pm

Jon, I’m looking forward to trying this tool, but after installing it, I get the following error message when opening Excel 2007: “object library invalid or contains references to object definitions that could not be found”

Any ideas on what might cause that?

Comment from Nate
Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010, 7:48 am

Jon, regarding my comment on the missing object library: I determined that this was being caused by a corrupted installation and not your add-in. I reinstalled E2007 and have it working now.