Thanks and Useful Suggestions

Old forum General discussion
1

Hello!

While writing my thesis I needed something to publish quickly excel graphs.
I was planning to actually write some code that would have let me do it but at a certain point I found your toolbox.
It’s really great and it actually helps a lot!

During my experience with excel I’ve compiled a small TODO list of probably useful functions that right now excel lacks.

  1. XY scatter from PivotGraph
    PivotGraphs are great, but there is no way to gey XY scatter plots with them.
    A possibility to have XY scatter plots from a pivottable/graph still exists though.
    This is done by copying the series string (=SERIES(;;)) from the pivotGraph
    and substituting an existing series string in an XY graph… this way you can have XY graphs that changes with your pivot table…
    Of course this must be done manually and if the number of series changes they have to be added or removed manually…
    The VBA code should be easy though.
    For what concerns the implementation, I was thinking about:
    You select the PivotGraph and another XY graph.
    You press a button and it automatically copies all the series from the pivot graph to the XY graph!

  2. Worksheet actualization of Charts.
    Let’s say you want to use the format of a chart in another WS which displays different data in the same position.
    If you want to you that very same chart with the new data in the other WS you have to select series by series and change the WS within each field of the series string (=SERIES(‘WSold’!..;…:wink: -> =SERIES(‘WSnew’!..;…:wink:)
    I think it might be very easy to implement a function that changes all the WS references to the one in which the chart has been copied.

  3. Excel range to Latex Tables.
    It’s a pain to convert excel cells that you have arranged in a excel table in a latex table… A little converter would be great, and very easy to do.
    It just needs to add some & and \ between the columns…

If you need more details / example cases where they might be needed I can provide them to you!

I think these two tricks might greatly improve Excel chart experience and add further value to your toolbox!
I’m interested in implementing them so if you want I can write some code or help you in some way.
Right now, however, I’m involved in the conclusion of my thesis… I’ll be free by the end of april…

Thanks again for your tool!

2

Hi Dario,

thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it!

  1. Interesting, but since I currently have extremely little time for the XL Toolbox, I will not be able to implement this for a while.

  2. This is possible right now! Look at the “Point charts” function: xltoolbox.sourceforge.net/pointchart

  3. Actually I have often thought about integrating other open-source tools with Excel. Besides Latex, an R interface would be nice, as well as the ability to create GnuPlot graphs, since these are still more flexible than Excel’s own charts. Let’s see what I can do about it.

Kind regards

Daniel