Product News « In the Flow

Version 2.2 of FlowBreeze Flowcharting add-in for Excel has been released. It has several new features and many minor usability improvements. Two of the features have come from customer requests – a Style Wizard, and Insert Branch tool.

The Style Wizard (shown below) lets you quickly apply formatting to an existing flowchart. You can make bulk edits to the font, style, or connector style. Or you can use the drop down selectors in the Symbol and Style columns of the grid to change individual shapes. (The Style Wizard is not available in FlowBreeze Basic Flowcharting Edition.)
Flowchart Style Wizard

The Insert Branch tool (shown below) provides a easy way to add tree / org chart structures to a flowchart. It allows you to add standard, left-hanging, and right hanging branches. Optionally, you can specify a label for the connector line of each branch.You can also set the shape type for each branch element and the spacing between branches.
The form is optimized for quick entry. When you hit the Enter key, the branch text and label will be added to the grid without having to tab over to the Add button. If the branch text and label fields are empty, hitting Enter again will close the form and generate the branches.

Insert Org Chart Branch

The bulk of the other changes were small improvements to other forms and a number of minor (but annoying) bug fixes.

FlowBreeze 2.0 was released a week ago. Very quietly. No formal announcemnent was made on the site. No press release was sent out. No current users were notified. I admit, it’s kind of a strange way of launching a major revision, but I had my reasons.

The biggest issue was testing. With 4 Microsoft Office versions, 3 Windows versions, and varying levels of user permissions, I felt the likelihood of a few bugs going undetected in testing was high. There isn’t much difference between Excel 2002(XP) and Excel 2003. But the jumps from Excel 2000 to XP and 2003 to 2007 are significant. Over time, I’ve seen permutations of all the possible the OS/Office combinations (except Office 2007 on Windows 2000). And they all have their quirks.

So in order to avoid getting a thousand emails pointing to the same bug, the release was purposely done quietly.

It turns out there were a number of issues that weren’t found in-house or by the handful of beta testers. I jumped on each one as the reports came in. So last week there were multiple updates posted daily. This weekend the last remaining issues on the list were tackled, and a new version was posted this morning.

With all the reported issues resolved, I will turn my attention toward getting a formal release package out, and send out product update notifications to all existing users. Overall, I’m happy with the way that this release has gone. Had I done it the other way around, I would have had to spend as much time answering emails as I did fixing the bugs and getting quick turn updates posted.

The “official” announcement, including a few major product changes, will be made soon.

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 …

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

As I battled the demons towards the planned launch of FlowBreeze 2.0, I stumbled upon Clarke Ching’s Rolling Rocks Downhill, a business novel about Agile Development in the tradition of Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal. It’s a great read so far, and I encourage everyone to take a look. It also made me change how I will do business here at BreezeTree.

I’ll be honest, FlowBreeze isn’t exactly the most complex code base you’ll come across. So I never looked at it from the perspective of a big, hairy project that could benefit from the use of a lot of the Agile Practices, although I already do Test Driven Development to a certain degree. For a small business there are a number of advantages to releasing major updates, which I won’t go into here. Many of those advantages will go away as I work towards more automated builds.

But one of the problems with FlowBreeze 2.0 is that so far, it doubles the size of the code base. And I haven’t even implemented all the planned features yet. In fact, there are a few features that have turned into such beasts that they are holding up the completion of the project.

What I’ve decided to do is switch tacks and start releasing individual features under minor release versions. The first release will be FlowBreeze 2.0, but the version number change is due to the numbering I’ve used for source code control more than anything. But honestly the difference between FlowBreeze 1.3 and 2.0 will be minor. Then I will start releasing minor versions of FlowBreeze – 2.1, 2.2, and so forth in more frequent succession.

Stay tuned…

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:

FlowBreeze Year 1 Sales Chart
FlowBreeze Year 1 Traffic Chart
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.

FlowBreeze Year 1 Sales and Traffic

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

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:

Start Flowcharting Window for Basic Grid
(Click to enlarge)

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:

Start Flowcharting Window for Template Loading
(Click to enlarge)

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.
Start Flowcharting Preview - Loaded Template sample
(Click to enlarge)
Again, more screen shots will be posted as they are finalized…

As version 2.0 of FlowBreeze nears release I will preview new features. This first feature preview is the save as Picture function in the new Export tool. The Save As picture tool allows you to save just the flowchart as a picture or select both the flowchart and a range of cells. Actually, there doesn’t even need to be a flowchart on the sheet – you can save a range of cells and anything included in it if you want.

Here is a screen shot:

Save Excel Flow Chart As Picture Dialog
(Click to enlarge)

The Save Flow Chart as Picture feature will support .png, .jpg, .gif, .bmp, .tif, and .emf formats. here is a preview of an Excel flow chart saved as a .png file:

Excel Flow Chart Saved as PNG Picture
(Click to enlarge)

More previews to come…

FlowBreeze build 1.3.42 was released today with the following fixes:

FlowBreeze now supports symbols with over 255 characters.
One character prefixes were being interpreted as node labels for circular Connector symbols. So, prefixes such as Q:, T:, and P: were incorrectly generating Connectors. The order of evaluation has been changed so prefixes are detected before applying other rules.

There is a known bug in several anti-virus products made by Computer Associates (and distributed to AOL customers) that is effecting some users of FlowBreeze. The problem becomes apparent when you click the FlowBreeze buttons to open the Settings window, Start Flowcharting, or try to register the software.

Computer Associates/AOL are reportedly going to release a fix to this problem on January 29. In the meantime, there is a workaround that involves editing the Registry. If you are not familiar with editing the Registry, then I urge you to wait for CA to release the fix because you can corrupt your system if you don’t know what you’re doing. For those comfortable with the Registry, the following steps can be taken to resolve this problem:

Click the Windows Start menu and click Run.
Enter regedit and click OK.
Expand the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE tree by clicking the “+” sign.
Expand the SOFTWARE tree by clicking the “+” sign.
Expand the ComputerAssociates tree by clicking the “+” sign.
On the right, click the ITMRT folder.
Double-click the InjectExclude key.
Add flowbreeze.dll to the list of accepted programs.
Exit the registry.
Restart your computer.

FlowBreeze build 1.3.40 has been released. The following bugs were fixed:

Bug: Turning off prompt for start terminator still resulted in being prompted. Fixed.
Bug: Turning off prompt for stop terminator still resulted in being prompted. Fixed.
Bug: Clicking Cancel on terminator prompt locked up Excel. Terminator prompt turns off Excel screen updating for faster rendering. Clicking Cancel bypassed turning the Excel screen updating back on. Fixed.
Annoyance: New symbols added next to Decision shapes crowded the downward branch label (text box). Cursor is now positioned one more cell down.

In the Flow

BreezeTree Software

Category Archives: Product News

FlowBreeze 2.2 Released

An Unofficial Announcement

FlowBreeze Flowchart Software v1.4 Released

Slouching Towards Bethlehem – a Change of Course for FlowBreeze 2.0

FlowBreeze Flowchart Software – First Year Sales Stats

FlowBreeze 2.0 Preview: Start Flowcharting Window

FlowBreeze Feature Preview – Save Excel Flow Chart as Picture

New minor release for FlowBreeze flow chart add-in

Known bug for Computer Associates / AOL anti-virus users

Minor FlowBreeze Update