Road map for 2011

For those users who are interested in my future plans for the XL Toolbox after the 2.73 release, here is my personal wish list.

Vector graphic export

The XL Toolbox provides the ability to produce high-resolution, publication-quality graphic files directly from Excel. These files can be submitted to scientific journals without further modification. It is even possible to use Excel to lay out multi-panel figures, and combine graphs with imported pictures.

While I’m very proud of this feature and have invested a tremendous amount of time to make it work, bitmap files (such as TIFF and PNG files) have several major disadvantages: For example, they tend to be huge, and they are not easily scalable.

Vector graphic files are a good alternative. They consume much less memory, and they are easily scalable. It is already possible to produce vector graphic files from Excel using the XL Toolbox. However, this is currently limited to EMF files, a Windows-specific file format.

I use Linux-based software for most of my work nowadays, and it would be great to be able to generate vector graphic files from Excel in a more compatible format than EMF. Thus, I am planning to implement support for the Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) format in the XL Toolbox. I chose SVG over other scalable formats (such as PostScript, for example), because it is much simpler to program, and it is a modern format.

This is likely going to be a long-term project.

Support for 64-bit Excel

Currently, the XL Toolbox does not run in a 64-bit environment. Adding 64-bit support to the addin is going to be a rather tedious task, but it seems worth while as I expect more and more computer users to switch to 64-bit software (which can handle much larger amounts of data than 32-bit software).

International language support

I wish to make the XL Toolbox speak more languages. Although most users are probably familiar with English, it would provide a smoother user experience if the add-in used the same language as the Excel environment that it is running in. The Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language does not provide native support for internationalization, so that I will have to invent something.

More statistical analyses

Finally, another long-term goal is to implement more ANOVA post-hoc analyses.

Time frame

I can give no time frame for the changes and additions outlined above, as I program the Toolbox in my spare time. It may take months before the next major release.

The following comments were imported from the previous blog software:

Everett Greer says:

December 11, 2010 at 02:23

Any idea when this will be 64-bit compliant? I loaded it on my machine, which is 64-bit, and it’s not working. I run almost everything 64-bit. Need two IEs because so many sites run flash, which is not 64. My Excel and Word work on 99% of time…..but not this time.

lazy_leukocyte says:

February 13, 2011 at 14:31

Everett,

if you are still interested in using the XL Toolbox on a 64-bit system, you may want to try the current beta version. I have no 64-bit system, so I could not test it, but I updated the program code so it should be 64-bit compliant.

Since this is not tested on 64-bit, it may crash at any time!

Please let me know if it works on your system.

http://sf.net/projects/xltoolbox/files/beta/XL_Toolbox_2.80beta2.exe/download

lazy_leukocyte says:

December 11, 2010 at 18:16

Hi Everett,

all I can say at this point is that I am working on it. This task involves going through all the code that is dealing with calls to the Windows programming interface (and there’s a lot of such code in the addin), and implement switches based on the current user’s operating system environment. I’ll put out a beta as soon as possible.

Daniel

Gernot says:

September 29, 2011 at 21:29

Hej Daniel

sometimes it would be nice to have the inverse of the transpose wizard available. Ef when you deal with kinetic data and you have calculated datapoints for eg 0, 5, 10 and 20 minutes for different treatments. Those will be in a linear 1-D array. Inversing hte transpose function would allow to generate a 2d array and use those data for a xY-plot

Right?

Cheers from Copenahgen, Gernot

jdsk says:

January 18, 2012 at 21:28

Hi Gernot,

I finally revisited the blog, cleaned out a ton of spam comments, and found your request.

If I get you right what you are requesting is already possible! It’s simply a matter of defining the input data layout as with 1 column, and n rows (or n columns and 1 row). Then, enter the appropriate number of replicates (say, 4 in your example, as you have 4 time points), and then let the transpose wizard do its thing. This should convert the list into a table, right?

Kind regards,

Daniel

Gernot says:

March 13, 2012 at 23:06

Hi Daniel

i tried a bit and this seems to work.

Is it possible to remove the naming with A1….

But thanks so far, Gernot

jdsk says:

January 19, 2012 at 09:44

I now got e-mail notifications to work again… So hopefully you will be notified about the new reply.

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