Preparing for the next major release (4.00)

Slowly, but steadily, I am working towards the release of version 4.00.

The major new feature of 4.00 will be localization: As a start, the XL Toolbox will come with German and Dutch translations. I have implemented a localization framework that uses the common GNU GetText format and enables translators to work with common translation tools. In the most simple case, all you need to translate the XL Toolbox to your native language is a basic text editor. If you want a little bit more comfort, you can use a specialized tool such as Poedit.

French and Spanish translations, but also translations to any other commonly used language, are most welcome. If you would like to contribute, read more about the translation process.

Version 4.00 will also fix a lot of bugs, some of them had been ‘bugging’ users for a long time.

Further down the road, I would still like to implement an SVG export capability for charts, but this will still take a very long time to complete.

The following comments were imported from the previous blog software:

Josh Uri says:

February 17, 2012 at 18:45

Hello, thanks for making this free and open-source add-in available! I was very hopeful that XLT’s interactive error bars would be just what I’ve been looking for to save my team a lot of time… but unfortunately the way it assumes that the negative error values will be in the adjacent col/row makes it useful for only a single series of data at a time. We often need to make charts with multiple series of data with custom error bars for each series (min/max, 20th/80th percentile, etc). I’m hoping either 1) to attempt making some edits to the program myself, if you could please send the relevant information to enable me to do so, or 2) you could consider adjusting the error bar portion of the XLT program to allow for independent selection of positive and negative error values. Thanks and I hope to hear from you soon. -Josh

Daniel says:

February 21, 2012 at 15:23

Hi Josh,

I get your point. Now I wonder what would be the best way to implement this. Should all the positive error values be grouped together, and then all the negative error values? Or should the postive and negative error values for each series be grouped…

This is something that is definitively worth improving. However since I am doing the programming in my spare time, it will take me a little while. Of course you are also most welcome to change the code yourself (after all it’s open source!), but it will be quite a challenge to find your way around inside the source code… Form_SelectErrorData and clsErrorBars are the modules you would have to look at.

Daniel

Josh Uri says:

February 21, 2012 at 23:04

Thanks very much for your response. I think I’ll take your advice and stay away from the source code (I’m not a programmer), we’ll just need to wait for a future version.

As for how to best implement this, in my experience it is usually most straightforward to group all of the positive values together and all of the negative values together (e.g. columns Sun, Mon, Tues… and rows 1,2,3… for each). If it would be helpful, I’d be happy to send a sample data set/ chart for illustration if you let me know what email address to use.

Thanks again,

Josh

Daniel says:

June 23, 2012 at 22:49

Hi Josh,

I finally put another beta version together. It has a reworked error bar algorithm. Handling of positive/negative error values can be adjusted in the user preferences as well as in the Interactive Error Bar dialog. You may download the beta version at http://sf.net/projects/xltoolbox/files/beta/XL_Toolbox_4.08.exe/download — please be aware that it may have rough edges. I’d appreciate feedback!

Kind regards,

Daniel

Hannu says:

June 2, 2012 at 15:14

Hi Daniel,

I read your tip on http://tinyurl.com/2anglva, but the explanation was not fully clear to a noob such as myself. More specifically, I would like additional info on the 2nd part of the code. I added the code as another class module but that didn’t seem to work.

Regards,

Hannu

Daniel says:

June 5, 2012 at 17:50

Hi Hannu,

you need to add this second part of the code into the worksheet’s code module, not as another class module. This is the important difference.

When you open personal.xlsb workbook and then open the Visual Basic Editor, you will see a list of code modules. There should be a code module “ThisWorksheet”. Double-click that one to open the module and insert the second part of the code in there.

Hope this helps!

Daniel

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