State of the Blog – Year End 2009
by Jon Peltier
Monday, December 21st, 2009
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
The last several months have been busy for me, professionally and otherwise. My business model has changed to incorporate more click-wrapped software utility sales and less project work, and I would like to do more training once the economy can sustain it.
The Excel Charting Utilities “division” of Peltier Technical Services is an outlet for many of the things I’ve worked on for many years, and I’m finding the whole experience very interesting. I’ve never had to deal with so many users that have such a wide range of experience and skills, operating under such diverse combinations of Windows and Excel versions (and IT interference support). At first there were problems with different Windows versions and security settings. Lately there have been queries about new features or adjustments of existing features. People use Excel and my utilities in ways I would never have imagined, and their problems and suggestions have already led to continual upgrades of these utilities.
I have some new utilities in the works. The replacement interface for Excel 2007 charting is very slowly taking shape. I’ve developed a workaround for the problems my Chart Zoomer has had in Excel 2007. Do you have suggestions for improving existing utilities? What completely new utilities would interest you?
In the past I had stated that I had no intentions of porting my utilities to the Mac. However, recently I’ve had some users ask for Mac versions of these utilities. Some users have had success running the utilities on Windows versions of Excel which are running in emulators, but not all Mac users have access to or expertise in using such emulation. Should I revisit my Windows-only policy?
One of my plans for the New Year is to develop a newsletter to help me communicate these upgrades to existing customers. The newsletter will also present usage examples to help users learn to use the utilities effectively. Would you be interested in a more general newsletter, covering topics related to those posted about in the blog? Would you like to read the product support utilities even if you are not a customer?
I have cut back on almost all new custom development projects, at least for the time being, so that I can focus on the software sales. The few new projects I’ve done have been for users who need customizations of the utilities. These are generally quick and straightforward, although one or two have involved integration into larger programs used by the customers. I continue to do work for clients who have remained steady over the past year.
I currently offer a handful of training classes, a couple times a year. Are these topics interesting? What other topics would you be interested in? Would you be interested in live or recorded internet training? Where should I consider holding training sessions?
Because of my business activities, I’ve been posting irregularly to the blog. Some weeks I’ve managed to squeeze out three or four posts, but other weeks it gets to be Thursday and I’ve posted nothing. Posting will remain intermittent through the New Year, but I’ll try to get back onto a regular posting schedule. Jimmy Peña of the Code For Excel And Outlook blog has reminded me that I can write a number of posts in advance and schedule them to be published over several days. I am working on a multiple-post tutorial that shows the various steps involved in building versatile, robust Excel add-ins. Are there other topics you would like to see in this blog?
I also am working on a redesign of the blog and overall website. What do you and don’t you like about the current blog?
Related Posts:
- Back in the Swing
- Macs vs. PCs
- Peltier Tech Chart Add-Ins Have Been Updated
- Statistical Process Control
- Charting Utility Upgrades
- Silent For Too Long
- I’ve reached a blogging milestone
- Introducing PTS Dot Plot Utility
- Looking Back at Peltier Tech in 2009
- Choice of Category Axis Order
Posted: Monday, December 21st, 2009 under General.
Comments: 22
Comments
Comment from derek
Time: Monday, December 21, 2009, 4:22 am
I don’t like not knowing where the conversation is happening. Could you replace “Recently Commented” with “Recent Comments”?
Comment from Chris
Time: Monday, December 21, 2009, 4:27 am
Keep up the good work Jon, really appreciate your effort!
I think user best practice blog posts would be very nice to see.
I’d be interested in reading more about Access/PPT and Excel Automation and would certainly take part in a dashboard/excel web-seminar since i’m located in europe and don’t think you’ll ever hold your training sessions over here….
Cheers!
Comment from Jorge Camoes
Time: Monday, December 21, 2009, 8:30 am
@Chris: We should press Jon to come to Europe. I already told him to consider a trip to London, but I had no luck…
Comment from JP
Time: Monday, December 21, 2009, 10:08 am
Wow Jon, what a meaty post.
First of all, thanks for the mention. Prewriting and scheduling posts will make excellent use of your time.
An affiliate newsletter would be useful, to help the resellers promote the product more. A generic newsletter might dilute your efforts. You already have the blog to communicate with the general public. If you did go that route, you’d probably want separate ones for the charting utils and the generic stuff.
Chris already mentioned the webinar, another great idea. Maybe 2-3x a year.
Comment from Dave Dudus
Time: Monday, December 21, 2009, 12:02 pm
Jon,
How about an advanced scatter plot utility that might include a ability to:
1- bin their x & y data on the values of a third series and allowing the user to specify the number of bins. The user would then be able to discriminate relationships and perform statistics on each bin ( trendlines, etc).
2- attach a “weighted least squares” functionality to the regression capabilities.
The binning is a simple thing that I do without VBA already, but it would be far more elegant as a formal add-in when coupled with some other capabilities.
Thanks for the opportunity to add my 2 bits worth.
Comment from Thom Mitchell
Time: Monday, December 21, 2009, 12:10 pm
Wonderful use of “text-decoration: line-through”; thank you for a post-finals-week and boxing-up-my-office-for renovations chuckle to start the week!
Comment from Doug Glancy
Time: Monday, December 21, 2009, 3:44 pm
Jon, you’ve mentioned your main reason for moving to Excel 2003 was Lists. I’m interested in learning how and when you use them. An overview of their strengths and limitations would be great, e.g., what kinds of projects you use them in, at what point you have to add VBA, etc. I tend to think they are great in projects where I’m trying to avoid VBA altogether, but a limitation I hit is that turning on protection kills the list functionality. (There’s at least one other issue I can think of).
Congratulations on your success with the utilities (and best wishes going forward)! And thanks for all your efforts on behalf of us Excel geeks.
Comment from Bob
Time: Monday, December 21, 2009, 11:58 pm
Hi Jon,
In my work, I do a lot of integration with Sharepoint 2007.
I think you would be able to get a series of posts out those sort of things. Also, the Excel publish HTML on save is useful.
As for Training, at least here in Toronto, some companies can spend a smaller amount for a 1-2 hour webinar rather than a 500-700 for a day of training. The model for webinars used over at EndUserSharepoint seems to be working.
This is one of the best blogs on around. Thank you for your contribution to the Excel community.
All the best in the New Year.
Bob
Comment from chrisham
Time: Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 12:10 am
Jon, thanks for blog, certainly gained a wealth of knowledge from your tutorials. My request would be for you to host some downloadable webnair of your seminars, thereby allowing geeks like us, half around the world to have an oppurtunity to your training courses! Keep up the good work!
Comment from Ed B
Time: Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 7:59 am
Just a thank-you from me for you unbelievably thorough Excel number formats page: http://peltiertech.com/Excel/NumberFormats.html.
I always have trouble with these, esp. since I live in Germany and there are issues with the dot and comma when converting between UK and DE formats :=)
Comment from Chandoo
Time: Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 9:01 am
Jon.. Congrats on a successful 2009 and wish you even more awesome 2010. I enjoy your products and your charting guidance much.
Also, you should certainly experiment with scheduled post feature in WP. I have been using only that for quite a while as it lets me hit the reader inboxes when they reach office.
Comment from Jeff Weir
Time: Wednesday, December 23, 2009, 2:25 am
Here’s an idea.
I often annotate my graphs with text boxes instead of using chart titles, data labels etc, as text boxes can be made just the right size whereas chart titles and data labels only accept so many characters before they word wrap.
But the problem with using text boxes is that when you resize the graph, the position of the text boxes doesn’t change. So they no longer sit where they should relative to the chart.
So how about a utility that lets you replace things like chart titles, data labels etc with text boxes automatically, and then moves them relative to any movement of the chart itself should the chart be resized?
Comment from Jeff Weir
Time: Wednesday, December 23, 2009, 4:03 am
Here’s another idea: one of Ajay’s recent posts at http://www.databison.com/index.php/one-axis-frequency-distribution-chart-in-excel-download-template/ got me thinking that it would be neat if you could somehow generate a One Axis Frequency Distribution Chart that sits over the top of a histogram. I constructed one of these in a guest post I wrote on Chandoo’s blog at http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/07/24/medicare-chart-critique/ – it’s about half way down, the 11th picture I think. But this was a bit of a pain. It might be handy for some users to have this functionality via an add-in or utility.
Comment from Jeff Weir
Time: Wednesday, December 23, 2009, 4:05 am
Yet another idea: A utility that helps mortals to apply custom number formatting to graphs. Custom number formatting is really confusing to the uninitiated. Now THIS would be cool.
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Wednesday, December 23, 2009, 12:21 pm
Jeff – Quite a few suggestions there, thanks.
Replacement text elements: Microsoft has promised that they would introduce user-sizable text elements, but then 2007 didn’t have them, nor does 2010. I wrote a routine once to replace category labels on a bar chart with text boxes because the labels were too long and wrapped. The logistics are tricky, to get a text box or other shape to stay aligned with a particular XY pair without actually locking it to a point. But it’s worth thinking about.
One-dimensional frequency chart: I don’t like these, because you really don’t get a good sense of the density of points. If they are too close, it turns black. If they are too sparse, they’re hard to read. They are essentially using shades of gray to encode values, or worse, they force me to get out my ruler and count how many points fall within each cm along the axis. What’s wrong with a cumulative probability chart? Even if your Y axis is counts instead of Z-scores, it’s easy to read. Steep=Dense.
Custom number formatting for chart axes: Well, I could get into that one. There could be some “standard” ones, then some user-saved ones. A little dialog could help design a format. I’ll bet Naomi would like that one, because it would cut down on repetitive %, $, etc.
How about an axis title manager, which you store commonly used axis titles, and you can apply any title from a dropdown.
Comment from Jeff Weir
Time: Wednesday, December 23, 2009, 3:09 pm
Your axis title manager suggestion is a great idea, but it would need a ‘Banjos’ setting, if you’re going to get buy-in from certain parts of the development community.
On the text elements side, what about a utility that truncated text elements that word-wrapped, so that they didn’t word-wrap?
“If they are too close, it turns black.” True. Or even worse, if they are solid blocks (e.g. squares with black fill) then you might get a whole lot lumped together and you would never know how many are underneath…which is why I used jittering (i.e. shapes with an outline but no fill, so you can better see overlaps ) in the example.
But I think they do give a good enough ’sense’ of density for the purpose of working out where are the thin parts and where are the thick parts of the distribution. Far from precise, but still a handy way to look at the underlying data in a histogram that might otherwise hide some hotspots. A visual analogy would be looking down on say a fairground crowd: Where is the highest density of people? At the front of the best attraction; in the lines to use the toilets; and at the bar. How many discrete people are there at each point? Don’t know, but it looks like there’s fairly equal density measures between the bar and the toilet for some strange reason ;-)
THat said, a cumulative probability chart is an excellent idea. Only downside is that it might take more space on the chart, and non chart-geeks might not understand it as well as a 1-d frequency chart.
(Random aside: All this talk of dimensions made me think of the movie Avatar which I saw the other day…I agree with the critic who said it’s such a pity a 3-D visual masterpiece has characters who are soooo completely 1-D)
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Time: Saturday, December 26, 2009, 3:25 am
[...] Jon Peltier and Chandoo are both planning to shake things up on their blog by introducing new features next year. [...]
Comment from Bob
Time: Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 9:04 am
Jon,
Happy New Year
Comment from J. Mansfield
Time: Friday, January 1, 2010, 7:33 am
Jon,
Agree with Chrisham – making your training materials available on-line for a fee to those that don’t have the ability to attend your courses might be a good addition to your business model. You might also consider offering your entire suite of utilities as one piece of software – similar to JWalk’s Pup7. Finally, have you ever considered writing a book? To start you could self-publish an ebook and make it available on your site for a fee. –Just some thoughts. Have a good New Year.
John
Comment from Jeff Weir
Time: Friday, January 8, 2010, 2:56 am
A book would surely have to be called ‘Reference Busters’ or similar.
Comment from Laura
Time: Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 1:55 pm
I was attempting to leave a comment on “Clustered-Stacked Column Charts” but I’m not able to. My question is: were these instructions written for Excel 2003? I’m not seeing some of the options you are telling me to use – like “paste special” and “chart options” (I’m running Excel 2007). Thanks!
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 3:31 pm
Laura -
I wrote the Clustered-Stacked Column Charts post based on Excel 2003, but in my comment of September 5, 2008, I described changes to the protocol in 2007.
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