Excluding the utilities from Excel 2007 was intentional, because at the time I released them I had not done extensive testing in 2007. The existing utilities will install a 2003-style button in the Add-Ins tab, but beyond this, the VBA code suffers from minor incompatibilities between pre-2007 and 2007 versions. I’ve determined which items need to be changed, and I’ve learned how to build a decent custom ribbon tab. Before too long I will start to release 2000-2007-compatible versions of these utilities, and these will probably be the last “beta” versions. Within a few months I plan to roll out a commercial application which combines all of my current utilities, along with other tools that I’ve developed over the years.

I used PTS Waterfall Charts in Office 2003 without any hassles. I installed Office 2007 recently on my machine and installed Waterfall charts again. Installation completed without any errors but I was not able to see PTS Waterfall Chart tab like in Excel 2003.

Where should I find it?

Thanks in advance and keep up the good work.

Could you enter your ‘start number’ where I have a starting value, cell B2 of my table?

I have done limited testing of my utilities in Excel 2007, and they seem to work. I’ve heard lately about probelsm when someone is using Vista. I do not yet run Vista, so I cannot address these issues.

If you are inclined, document the problems and send me a report (error messages, what you’re trying to do and how, what you expect to happen, and what actually happens instead). Doesn’t have to be too detailed or too polished, just more than “it doesn’t work”.

Thanks for the report.

Glad to see that kind of chart. I worked on that kind of utility for explaining Business Plan variations and had to think the same charts.
The way I did it was quite the same as you did. But I didn’t try to automated it.
I’m downloading your Addin ASAP to test it, ‘cose it will certainly help me in a near future.

TIA

Re 2007:

In general my utilities seems to work in 2007. The only special work I did late in the 2007 beta process was to test one of the utilities that someone told me was not working in 2007. It turned out that a particular two line piece of code worked in 2000-2003 but didn’t work in 2007. Reversing the order of the two lines was all it took for the code to run in 2000-2007. I wish I’d written down which two lines these were, for an upcoming web page on programming charts in 2007.

I have noticed other things in 2007. In the beta, one of my tricks of making a line chart to get a date axis, then adding other series as XY to use this axis with different sets of dates, didn’t work, because an XY series doesn’t recognize the date axis in 2007. I haven’t tested this yet in the RTM. In the RTM, a newer version of my box and whisker utility has a strange Y axis: the line appears thicker at the top of the chart than at the bottom. I don’t know if it’s an actual thickening of the line or some kind of gradient shading, but I plan to follow up.

Applying a style in 2007 causes problems because what look like a bar of one color can be comprised of multiple series (above/below zero requires two stacked columns, and there are invisible series which help the other columns float). The same problem occurs in 97-2003, because Excel only knows what series there are, not that some are designed to look like each other, or like nothing at all.

Re: Which chart to use…

Over time I’ve concentrated more on the mechanics of Excel charting, but that’s only half the story. It doesn’t matter if you can make the best pie charts, if pie charts are so bad anyway at conveying information. The most popular item on my web site, judging from email, is the speedometer chart, and this is one of the worst chart types for conveying meaningful information; I only did it as a demo of an unusual combination of chart types, and I’ve been trying to convince people not to use it. I really should remove the page, but it is a good example of unexpected combination chart types.

Long story short, I plan to introduce content on my web site to help guide users to choose appropriate chart types and techniques to show data more effectively, and to avoid chart types which are confusing, misleading, and too time-consuming to comprehend. This includes but is not limited to charts with gratuitous 3D effects as well as unnecessary coloring and shading formats. The old (pre-2007) default formats in Excel are certainly not pretty; on the other hand some of the special effects easily attainable in 2007 are not only very pretty, but also fit in the category of confusing, misleading, and too time-consuming to comprehend.