Category: Excel Add-ins

Spider Charts in the Wild

This week, Tushar Mehta posted about his Custom Radar Chart add-in on the Daily Dose of Excel blog. These are also known as Spider charts, and I’ve never created one, except as a demo in an Excel class, when someone asked about them. It probably looked like the one shown below, or the Excel 97 version of that.

radarchart02

Radar charts can be tough to interpret, and Excel chart expert, Jon Peltier, suggests several alternative chart types that you can use, instead of a radar chart.

Despite the controversy, I was surprise to find this radar chart / spider chart while wandering the streets today. It might not be an effective way to present data, but it does make a nice roof!

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Interactive Excel Learning

Thanks for participating in my Online Excel Tutorials survey last week. There were 21 votes, and I wasn’t surprised that 57% or the votes were in favour of written instructions. Written tutorials with screen shots are my favourite way to learn online.

Only 2 people voted for short videos, but in the comments, Mathias said that videos were slowly growing on him, and I agreed. They can be a helpful supplement to written material, allowing you to see some or all of the steps performed. Maybe bookmarks or captions of some kind would help, so you could skim through the video, and get to the specific section you need.

What did surprise me was the 33% vote for interactive lessons. My experience with those is limited, so if you like interactive lessons, could you let me know where you find them?

I tried a virtual lab on the weekend, to test PowerPivot, so perhaps that’s the kind of thing that people find useful. The hands on lab let me test the PowerPivot without installing tons of stuff on my machine, and had written instructions at the side, to guide me through the steps.

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How to Price Your Software

On my Contextures site you can download my free pivot table add-in, PivotPower. So far, I haven’t created an Excel product for sale, but a few of my Excel colleagues have.

One of the challenges is in setting a price for the software. How do you decide what to charge?

To help you through the process, you can download a free pdf file of the book Don’t Just Roll the Dice, by Neil Davidson, of Red Gate Software. If you prefer a physical copy of the book, you can buy it on Amazon.

Excel Giveaways 20091021

I’ve just announced the Very Scary Fall Giveaway for Excel Nerds on my Contextures Blog. Lots of great Excel utilities, books and ebooks to give away, thanks to my generous Excel friends:

Ken Puls has also announced an Excel giveaway today, for WinAutomation licences. You can read the details in his blog article: WinAutomation