New and Improved

Announcing the new and improved Peltier Tech Chart Add-Ins for Microsoft Excel. They were pretty good to begin with, but there have been some changes. I’ve updated all of the add-ins, plus tested them in umpteen versions and languages of Excel, repackaged them, and uploaded them.

If you have purchased one of these add-ins and are experiencing problems, let me know and I’ll send you a link to the new version as soon as I can.

If you’re not having problems, but want to use the newer version, let me know and I’ll shoot you a link, within a week.

Excel 2010 Compatibility

The charting add-ins already worked in Excel 2000 through 2007, and I recently had made the minor changes to the installer that detected and installed in Excel 2010. But that was the 32-bit version of Excel 2010.

My first 64-bit customer bought one of my add-ins a week or so ago, and reported compile errors when Excel started. This is because the old Windows API calls had not been upgraded for the new operating system.

Thanks to the magic of conditional compilation, which I had never used before, I was able to compile the old working code for 32-bit Excel 2000 through 2010, while compiling the new API calls for 64-bit Excel 2010.

Foreign Language Link Addresses

This has become a favorite. I’ve written a blog post telling how to Link Chart Text to a Cell. Well, you can create these links in VBA also. But you can’t use the regular A1 style links, that is, =Sheet1!$A$1. You need to use R1C1 notation for these links, like =Sheet1!R1C1. Big deal, I can figure those out.

Now, there’s an issue with these links. R1C1 is spelled correctly in English, but in German, for example, row and column are Zeile and Spalte, so the equivalent German notation is Z1S1. So these links need to be of the form =Tabelle1!Z1S1.

Why am I waiting so long to fix this problem? Well, that’s what makes this one a favorite. See, in Excel 2003 and earlier, you can use the English R1C1 address for the link, and it will work fine, and in fact, the foreign link format will not work. So I never encountered a problem.

Then recently, I was doing some testing in Excel 2007, and the A1C1 links were not working. I ran a few trials, realized I needed the local link format, and updated all the code. I wondered why none of my foreign users had ever reported a problem.

Suddenly I got a bunch of error reports, from foreign users of Excel 2003. And I thought, Didn’t I just correct this problem? So I did a bunch of testing, and I asked some of users of non-English Excel to help with this testing, and we learned:

• Excel 2000-2003: R1C1 works in all languages, local address fails.
• Excel 2007-2010: Local address works in all languages, R1C1 fails. But the A1 address now works, too.

Interesting inconsistency. Really, Excel 2007 has corrected faulty behavior from Excel 2003. Unfortunately this discrepancy had broken my existing code. But it’s now fixed.

Miscellaneous Fixes

I took this opportunity to make some other minor but overdue changes.

• Dot Plot: Improved chart creation routine, which makes program quicker and more reliable.
• Dot Plot: Fixed top border of chart in 2007 and plot area line color.
• Cluster-Stack: Chart now appears at top of sheet, above data. You no longer have to scroll down a couple windows to find the chart.
• All Utilities: brought ReadMe and EULA files up-to-date.
• Small enhancements too numerous to mention.

Other Recent Improvements

In the past few months I’ve made a number of other changes.

• All Utilities: Implemented Alternative to Excel’s Flaky RefEdit Control.
• Cluster-Stack: Added option for Clustered-Stacked bars as well as columns.
• Waterfall: Added option to create chart in the active worksheet instead of a new worksheet.
• All Utilities: Streamlined the setup file operation and extended installation to Excel 2010.
• All Utilities: Fixed issue that occurred when data worksheet name contained a hyphen.
• And more, but my hardware is getting too soft to remember.

What Else?

What features that you want to see are lacking? What functionality isn’t available? Keep in mind that I do have a few programs on the workbench, but I’m not averse to suggestion.

Related Posts:

• Make Your Recorded Macro Independent of Which Sheet is Active
• I’ve Moved
• Excel 2007 Regression Error – Fixed in SP1
• Copy Chart and Data and Preserve Links
• Copy a Pivot Table and Pivot Chart and Link to New Data
• VBA to Filter Chart Data Range
• State of the Blog – Year End 2009
• Installing an Excel Add-In
• Unspecified but Painfully Frustrating Error
• Introducing PTS Dot Plot Utility