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Wii Would Like To Flowchart
My oh so clever 11 year-old son Nathan gave me this flowchart. I gotta hand it to him. The kid’s tenacious.
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FlowBreeze Flowchart Software One Day Sale
Flowcharting Software at a Deep Discount
FlowBreeze is was featured on Bits du Jour today. The sale is now over.
Product DescriptionsFlowBreeze Basic is a simplified flowcharting tool that allows you to create flowcharts just by typing. It produces business document friendly black and white flowcharts in Excel. It integrates well into all Office documents and is perfect for training materials and process documentation.
FlowBreeze Standard extends the capabilities of the Basic edition. It features 124 symbols with 84 preset styles and 21 preset connector styles. It has an image exporter for publishing flowcharts to the web, help files, and any other document that could use a splash of color. It also features the Text-To-Flowchart Wizard, which allow you to pre-layout the flowchart in plain text on an Excel spreadsheet then import into the wizard to set the symbol types, style, connector routings, and decision branch labels. Then it auto-generates the flowchart for you.
A complete feature comparison can be found by clicking here.
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FlowBreeze Basic Flowcharting Edition Released
FlowBreeze is now available in two editions Standard and Basic Flowcharting Software.
The Basic Edition was created in response to customer demand for a light weight version of the product at a reduced price. It still utilizes the same, highly productivity text-to-symbol engine. But the Basic edition has a simplified start window, is limited to black and white flowcharts, and uses just the 28 core flowcharting symbols.
FlowBreeze Basic Edition is perfect for creating process flowcharts to be used in business documents such as work instructions and training manuals, where simple design is preferred and color is unneeded. The differences between FlowBreeze Standard and FlowBreeze Basic editions are covered in detail in the feature comparison table. Also, the changes to the user interface are shown on the screen shots page.
For user convenience, the two editions are packaged in the same download. The different capabilities are highlighted in the the trial and, upon purchase, activated via different license codes.
The following are sample flowcharts of the 8D problem solving process invented at Ford Motor Company. The first flowchart was created with FlowBreeze Standard Edition, and the second flowchart shows the same diagram in black and white created with FlowBreeze Basic.
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Top 10 Signs That Your Google Search Results Suck: Flowchart
I’m working on a new product, and I’ve been doing a lot of search for related content lately. Maybe it’s just me, but my feeling is that the results are getting worse and worse. Hence, the top 10 signs your Google search results suck flowchart:
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FlowBreeze 2.0 Help Online
In lieu of a full preview of FlowBreeze 2.0, I have posted the help file online. A firm release date has not been set, but an October launch is most likely. The full list of new features and improvements will be posted soon, but the following is a sampling of some of the more prominent ones.
Text-To-Flowchart Wizard
The Text-To-Flowchart Wizard allows you to pre-layout a flowchart in plain text on a worksheet. It will load the text into a form that allows you to set the symbol type, style, out-bound flow line routings, and any branch labels for Decisions. Below are screenshots of the Text-To-Flowchart Wizard window and the resulting flowchart.
So this …
… becomes this:
Integrated Excel 2007 Styles
FlowBreeze 2.0 allows you to preset the symbol styles using the styles available in Excel 2007 - even if you are using a previous version of Excel. In general, the styles render nicely in previous versions of Excel (with the exception of the last row of styles in the first image, which are only available in Excel 2007). Below are the two tabs for the symbol style selector window and the flow line style selector window.
Flowchart Settings
The Settings received a major overhaul in version two. As shown below, the styles can now be preset by symbol type, as well as the default width and minimum height. The keywords and prefixes still function the same for text to symbol generation, but the editor has been simplified. FlowBreeze ships with a basic set of flowcharting symbols “active”, but the symbol list editor now has 124 different shapes available. Other new features have been added to the “Special Symbols Settings” and “Advanced Settings” (not shown), and those will be outlined on the product page upon release.
Flowchart Templates and Other Startup Options
FlowBreeze 2.0 will ship with an integrated template loader. When you start a flowcharting session, you will now be able to load a template for title blocks; cross-function diagrams (aka swim lanes or deployment charts); opportunity charts; DMAIC, PDCA and SIPOC diagrams; or a number of other flowchart and block diagram templates, as shown in the image below.
Save As Picture
Excel has always had limited capability to export shapes and worksheet ranges as picture files. FlowBreeze 2.0 will allow you to save flowcharts as PNG, BMP, JPG, GIF, TIF, or WMF picture files. Not only can you save the flowcharts as pictures, but you can save spreadsheets as well. One of the major selling points for FlowBreeze is the convergence of data and diagrams. The screenshot below shows a flowchart with spreadsheet data being saved as a picture.
More to Come
There are many other features that were added to FlowBreeze 2.0, and the full details will be announced upon release.
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FlowBreeze Flowchart Software v1.4 Released
Without much fanfare, BreezeTree Software released FlowBreeze v1.4 the other day. I’ll get to the fanfare bit later. The following is a summary of the changes.
New Features
- Apply Styles: Applies the default styles to all the flowchart symbols and lines in the drawing.
- Toggle Gridlines: By default FlowBreeze hides the gridlines. This simply lets you toggle them on/off.
- Extract Flowchart Text: Iterates through all the flowchart symbols and outputs the text to a worksheet - useful for assigning and tallying process metrics.
Changes
- The Toggle Toolbars feature has been replaced with integrated drop down menus, now with more symbols added.
- A fail-safe has been added to the toolbar loading. Occasionally Excel will hang when setting toolbar icons. If this occurs, the toolbar buttons will revert to all text. (Given all the cryptic icons out there, this is actually kind of refreshing.)
- The Smart Sizing feature has been extended to Decision shapes. Formerly, their height was set based on the text length, often producing short, squat diamonds. The new approach is to set the minimum height equal to the width for a uniform look.
Bug Fixes
- Yes.
[There were a number of fixes, most having to do with gracefully handling the changes to the Excel 2007 AutoShapes object model.]
Why No Fanfare?
The 3rd party licensing tool used by FlowBreeze has been causing a number of Vista compatibility issues. If you are running Vista and interested in trying FlowBreeze, please contact me directly and I will send you a Vista friendly version.
More to come on that issue …
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ANSI Y15 Died so Steve Martin Could Live
I had planned to write a piece on my upcoming process mapping software, since I have been fielding a lot of questions on it lately. But it was one of those days, and I got sidetracked by coincidence. I was in my garage searching for a old copy of the ANSI standard for process mapping symbols without any luck, and what do I find sitting inside the last box I looked in? Cheaper by the Dozen.
A few years ago I got stuck had the pleasure of taking my kids to go see the latest remake of it with Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, and the remaining cast of wacky characters. Steve Martin plays football coach, which is kind of sad because that’s not the original story at all. In the real life story, the dad was an Engineer. Egad! We can’t be having that in Hollywood. In Hollywood, ‘business people’ are in advertising, publishing, or at least sales. Definitely NOT Engineering. But even a generic business career was too bland, so they recast the role as a football coach.
The original semi-autobiographical story was written by the children of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Frank was not a football coach. He started out as a bricklayer and went on to become a management engineer. Together he and Lillian collaborated on the study of work motion that became one of the foundations of Industrial Engineering. There’s a ton of material available detailing his career, and quite frankly it was the kind of stuff that would put me to sleep as an undergrad. So I won’t pretend that it’s interesting now.
But the irony is, Frank Gilbreth is also the inventor of Process Charts. That’s what I was looking for! And all I found was a lame Hillary Duff movie.
Gilbreth’s Process Charts were a predecessor of flowcharts. They used 5 basic symbols: a Circle for Operation; a Square for Inspection; an inverted Triangle for Storage; a block Arrow for Transportation, and a big D for Delay. These symbols were adopted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) when they published the first standard on process mapping symbols, which I believe evolved later to become ANSI Y15.3M, Operation and Flow Process Charts Standard.
This year the ASME withdrew the ANSI Y15.3 standard.
It’s just as well. The problem with Process Chart symbols is that there really isn’t a standard that anyone adheres to. Plus, there exist several other standards for process flowchart symbols, and they all stink.
Since FlowBreeze is an Excel add-in, it uses the symbol set included with Microsoft Office. I don’t know the official source of their symbol set, but as far as I can tell it’s exactly the same as the template that IBM used in the 1960’s for data processing flowchart symbols. That’s why every version of Microsoft Office ships with such useful symbols as Punch Tape, Card, and Sequential Access Storage.
The process mapping version of FlowBreeze will include the capability to use traditional process mapping symbols, as well as many other features. A run down of those will have to wait for another blog post…
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Introducing the Worlds First Website Created with Excel 2007
It may sound nutty, but I decided to use Excel 2007 to re-design my website. OK, the title of this post is a bit misleading. I didn’t actually design the web pages themselves with Excel 2007, but I did use it to create all the new graphics.
The Excel 2007 development team did a wonderful job re-writing the Office Drawing Tools from the ground up. The new AutoShape formatting capabilities are really impressive. Not only are the default formats stylish, but they also allow you to add some nice effects, including reflection, drop shadows, glow, 3D, and more.
Since BreezeTree Software is build around the convergence of data and (most importantly) diagrams in Excel, I wanted to emphasize the graphics capabilities of Excel on my site. So what better way than to use Excel 2007 itself to create the graphics. The re-design started out as a proof of concept, show casing that you really can create professional and stylish flowcharts in Excel. Then I decided to go for it. Hopefully I pulled it off. 
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FlowBreeze Flowchart Software - First Year Sales Stats
I wanted to say Thanks! to all the BreezeTree customers who have made this a great first year.
The first six months were a little slow, but after the release of FlowBreeze 1.2, sales really started to pick up. FlowBreeze (a Flowchart Generator for Excel) has benefited from a lot of word of mouth marketing. Plus, the internet has a way of rewarding you over time. As a site’s age grows, it collects a few links here and there, and rises in the search engines.
I’ve decided to publish my sales growth numbers along with traffic growth. I’m too secretive to provide actual numbers, so I’ve normalized the first month of sales and traffic equal to one (1). Numbers-wise, I will say that the traffic is up over 40,000 visits per month. However, that isn’t unique visitors and doesn’t filter out spiders and bots. The main point of interest is the trend.
Sales for most software vendors start out slow, but FlowBreeze benefited from having a beta test signup in place for 6 months prior to release. Beta testers were given a 50% discount, so I was able to sell a decent number of licenses right out of the gate.
So, without further blabbering, here are the sales growth and traffic growth charts:
This third chart is traffic overlaying sales. The interesting thing is that traffic is a clear leading indicator of sales. That may seem like an obvious correlation, but it’s reassuring to see that BreezeTree.com is getting relevant traffic growth.
Overall, I would say that this little flowcharting utility has outperformed my first year’s expectations. I will continue to improve the product and add features based on customer feedback. I am looking forward to releasing version 2.0 soon.
I will also be leveraging the FlowBreeze platform in several ways this year. First, I will leverage the existing code base to spawn off a Value Stream Mapping version of FlowBreeze. The other way I will be leveraging it is by taking advantage of Excel’s built-in data analysis strengths. this will come to light not only in the Value Stream Mapping product, but also in a Business Process Mapping tool that add metrics and process modeling to flowcharts.
So thanks again to everyone who has helped make this a great first year, and I look forward to having an even better second year.
- Nicholas Hebb
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FlowBreeze 2.0 Preview: Start Flowcharting Window
FlowBreeze 2.0 gets a new Start Flowcharting prompt. The old Start Flowcharting prompt only allowed you to set the start Terminator symbol text and location. The new window makes that optional, plus it allows you to create a set the page properties, show/hide the Excel grid lines, and either create a simple grid or load a template.
For a simple grid, you can set the page properties. these can always be changed later through the standard File > Page Setup menu, but their main purpose for flow charts is to display the page breaks as a set of drawing area boundaries. Here is the screen shot:
Choosing the template option, you can choose from 22 different template styles in 4 different page sizes (8-1/2×11, 11×17, A3, and A4). That number will grow over time. Here is the screen shot for the Start Flowcharting window with the Load a Template option choosen:
When you choose to load a template, the template gets loaded into a new worksheet and (optionally) the start Terminator symbol is added containing the text you entered. Below is a screen shot of a loaded flow chart template with the start Terminator symbol added and formatted. The cursor is positioned for the next entry, waiting to convert your text entry into a flow chart symbol based on a set of rules that you can customize (screen shots for that are coming). The shaded guidelines assist you to ensure the symbols are properly aligned.
(Click to enlarge)
Again, more screen shots will be posted as they are finalized…