SpreadsheetWorld announces the initial release of their XLProPlot data plotting application for engineers and scientists using the Excel platform.

SpreadsheetWorld announces the initial release of XLProPlot, the first plotting application designed specifically to meet the requirements of engineers and other technical professionals using Microsoft Excel for their analysis and plotting needs.

Encino, CA - - February 26, 2003 - - SpreadsheetWorld has officially released the initial version of XLProPlot for sale to the general public. XLProPlot is the first plotting application designed specifically to meet the requirements of engineers and other technical professionals using Microsoft Excel for their analysis and plotting needs.

In recent years, the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and its built-in VBA programming language have become powerful tools that are vastly under utilized in technical professions. There is a tendency to view the spreadsheet in terms of its limited capability in early versions, but it is important that engineers become more aware of the power and capability of current versions." says Dr. Tom Mincer, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at California State University and President of SpreadsheetWorld. Some of the main reasons for this underutilization have been the perceived difficulties and limitations encountered when trying to produce quality plots for technical publications or as part of a larger analysis task. XLProPlot aims to provide technical professionals with easier access to the plotting capabilities already available in Excel while also providing unmatched plotting capabilities directly from VBA procedures -- all for hundreds of dollars less than comparable packages.

XLProPlot includes a suite of QwikTools" that provide one-click creation and formatting of XY scatter plots, the most suitable plot style for technical data presentation in Excel. By using an organized set of popup menus in lieu of icon-based toolbars, XLProPlot does not require users to learn a new application but instead is immediately useable by even beginner spreadsheet users. Using the QwikTools", technical looking plots are easily created with a single button click instead of traversing through multiple dialog windows. Also, formatting plots using XLProPlots single-click" methodology allows changes to be instantly realized by the user instead of having to spend time opening and closing multi-tabbed dialog windows. This allows users to spend more time formatting their plots to their requirements and less time navigating a complex application. As a part of the QwikTools" array, XLProPlot also provides easy one-click access to many advanced plotting features such as multiple X and Y axes, custom axis label numeric formats, custom data labels, exporting plots as pictures, and much more.

For more advanced applications, XLProPlot provides access to professional technical plotting capabilities directly from VBA. For some VBA-driven analysis applications, it is inconvenient to have to move data from VBA to an Excel worksheet range before a plot may be created. SpreadsheetWorld has developed an intuitive, easy-to-use object model to drive a 3rd party technical plotting application that is bundled with XLProPlot. This object model makes full use of context-sensitive drop-down lists, allowing users to quickly and easily produce quality results. Although simple plots may be created with only a few lines of VBA code, extensive plot formatting capabilities are exposed through various properties and methods in the object model. The structure of XLProPlots object model is especially ideal for use in iterative analyses. It includes commands to save plots to picture files, send plots directly to a printer, or simply leave them open in the external plotting application for subsequent modification.

Dr. Mincer and the SpreadsheetWorld team have been developing Spreadsheet Aided workshops over the last 7 years. The flagship Spreadsheet Aided Engineering workshop has been offered over 120 times to more than 2,000 engineers at companies such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop-Grumman, NASA, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Pratt & Whitney and Harley-Davidson. More information on this course as well as the other courses in the Spreadsheet Aided Engineering series, such as their new Spreadsheet-Aided Data Plotting and Analysis course which features XLProPlotTM, is available by calling SpreadsheetWorld toll-free at 1-866-285-9068 or visiting their website at http://www.spreadsheetworld.com.

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