Utilities

Happy Birthday to Me!

As promised last week, the Advanced Edition of the Peltier Tech Chart Utility is here.

What’s In It?

The new software has all of the goodies of the current product, and nearly doubles it with lots of new custom charts and a handful of new features.

Here are how the products line up.

You’ll notice all of the new charts, including several more variations on waterfall charts. I guess you can never have too many variations on that theme, because folks are always asking for this or that “minor” adjustment. (“You can do it, you’re smart.”) The split bar is like having a separate waterfall for each bar of the waterfall

There are a couple variations on the histogram. The bars are the same, but the horizontal axis is built in two different ways, both of them better than plain old column charts in Excel, and better than the histogram in the Excel Analysis Toolpak.

While mulling over a thread in the Mr Excel forum not long ago, I came up with the routine that nicely exports a range to an image file. This is a nice companion to the Export Chart feature that’s been a staple of the Standard Edition. The Export Chart to Word and PowerPoint are goodies that I would toss into projects for clients, because they are cool and they didn’t know they wanted them.

Switch X and Y is a feature I built for my own use back in the day, when my company was still using Excel 97 and the rest of the world was using 2003. Very handy.

After I played with Jon Acampora’s tool to Move and Align Chart Titles, Labels, Legends with the Arrow Keys, I dusted off and finished my own arrow key positioning device and added a resizing function. It’s pretty cool, but there’s still some funny business when you make the first adjustment to the size of the plot area, at least in Excel 2013.

You should also notice that against all odds, the green column has every single one of the items in the yellow column. My previous product release was the Mac version of the Standard Edition of the Utility, and I was very pleased that I was able to get everything into the Mac version. Of course, the devil now owns 3/8 of my soul. Or Steve Jobs. Or do I repeat myself?

What’s coming?

First, I’m going to have to write some articles about using the Utility. I figure each topic will yield a blog post and a section of the online documentation.

Next, or in parallel, I’m going to put together a Mac version. I still have 5/8 of a soul for collateral.

Finally I’ll keep working on more custom charts, and this Advanced Edition will be the repository for them. On my slate are run charts, grouped box plots, tornado (sensitivity) diagrams, simple panel charts, and finally, a revival of the trellis charts based on my old Panel Chart Utility.

Among the charting features I have in mind are a zooming function, where you draw a box around points on the chart, and the axes will adjust to blow up those points. This box-drawing tool could be repurposed to allow selection of a subset of data, placing it into a new series for its own analysis. Also I was working on a point dragger, where you would click and drag on a plotted point, and the cell data would change to reflect the new position of the point. That was a popular feature in Excel 2003 and earlier, and Excel 2007 killed it along with all of those kittens.

How Can You Get The Utility

Go to the Peltier Tech Chart Utility page to license the utility. There are a few special deals.

From now through next Wednesday (June 18), you can buy the Advanced Utility for the price of the Standard Edition, by entering a coupon code found on the Utility page.

If you have already licensed the Standard Edition, email Peltier Tech to get a code to let you upgrade to the Standard Edition at no charge.

If you have a valid license for any of the older one-chart utilities, email Peltier Tech to get a different coupon code that will get you the Standard or Advanced Edition at a 50% discount.

As always, there are discounts for quantities greater than one license.

Announcing the Peltier Tech Advanced Chart Utility

I’m happy to announce the release of the Advanced Edition of the Peltier Tech Chart Utility on Thursday, 12 June 2014.

Why the 12th?

Am I superstitious? Am I avoiding Friday the 13th?

No!

June 12th is my birthday, and this is my present to myself.

Also, the ten days between now and then should give me almost enough time to ready the utility for release. In the days between now and then I will finish up the last couple of features, perform a little testing, and write about some of the new (and old) features here.

History

In September 2008 I introduced the Peltier Tech Waterfall Chart Utility. This was much more popular than I would have expected, and soon it became my primary activity. From this modest beginning five and a half years ago, I grew the product line into a series of small chart utilities, each having a single function: create a non-native chart in Excel with a click of a button. This set of utilities was popular, but it made addition of new charts and features hard to accomplish. A whole new product just for that little thing?

A bit over a year ago I released the Peltier Tech Chart Utility, which combined most of the smaller individual program into one grand utility. The individual utilities were upgraded (and enhancements are continually being made), and were combined with several useful charting features. Now I have a place for new features, and my customers can get all of the goodies in one simple program.

A month ago I came out with a Mac version of the Standard Utility, with all of the features of the Windows version, and that has been twice as popular as I had expected.

Of course, I had loads of other ideas for my utility, but I didn’t have time to get everything into the final product.  So I released what I had into the Standard Edition of the tool. In the meantime I worked on these additional features.

These additional features are being incorporated into this new Advanced Edition, which includes everything from the Standard Edition and a whole lot more.

Comparison

In the grid below you can see that the Standard Chart Utility has quite a lot of custom charts, including the popular Waterfall, Cluster-Stack, and Box and Whisker charts. The Advanced Edition includes a few more variations on waterfall charts, a Diverging Stacked Bar Chart useful for plotting survey results, Histograms (two types) and Pareto Diagrams, and Cycle Plots.

The following grid shows the extensive lineup of features of the Standard and Advanced Chart Utilities. In addition to functions that easily edit the series formula, handle labeling of series so the legend isn’t needed, opening the folder in which the active sheet is stored, and exporting a chart as an image file, the Advanced Edition can also export a range as an image file, export one or more charts into PowerPoint or Word in several formats, switch various X and Y aspects of a chart (data, axis scales, and/or axis titles).

In addition, new charts and features under development will be added to the Advanced Chart Utility, and anyone with a valid license can simply email me to request a link to the update.

Macintosh Version

Is there an Advanced Chart Utility for the Mac?

No.

Will there be an Advanced Chart Utility for the Mac?

Of course. It will take a little time to develop, because Mac and Microsoft do not exactly spell compatibility. But plans are to have it available by the end of June.

Special Deal

The Peltier Tech Advanced Chart Utility will be available on Thursday, 12 June 2014. Anyone who has a valid license for the Standard Edition before this release date can upgrade to the Advanced Edition for free. You simply need to email me asking for a coupon code for a free upgrade between now and 11:59 pm EDT, Friday, 13 June 2014.

The Peltier Tech Advanced Chart Utility will retail for $99 US (the Standard Edition is $79). On Thursday and Friday, 12-13 June 2014, you can get the Advanced Edition for the same $79 price as the Standard Edition. There will be a coupon code for this discount right next to the Add to Cart button on the Peltier Tech Chart Utility web page.

As always, users of the older versions of the Peltier Tech Utilities can email me to get a coupon code for a 50% discount.