My oh so clever 11 year-old son Nathan gave me this flowchart. I gotta hand it to him. The kid’s tenacious.

(Click to enlarge) 

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 […]

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 […]

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:
(Click to enlarge)

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

If you’re one of the early adopters of Excel 2007, then FlowBreeze is ready for you. The flow chart add-in for Excel is now Excel 2007 compatible. Excel now has a Ribbon replacing the classic menus and toolbars, but the FlowBreeze toolbar is still accessible under the Add-Ins tab of the Ribbon.
More info (and pictures!) […]

Just a quick note - I released a Flow Chart Symbols Cheat Sheet today. It contains pictures of the 30 most commonly used flow chart symbols, along with their name(s), and a short description. Some flow chart symbols have different meanings under different uses, so those are identified as well.
Click here to visit the Flow […]

Sometimes when someone says something really nice, you just have to spout about it.
As a flowchart tool maker, I use flowcharting in development all the time. True, most of my flowcharts are for the process, not the code, but, I’ve always had the feeling that I was a dying breed. That’s why it’s been such […]

The FlowBreeze 2.0 incorporates a flowchart template loader. Since the flowchart templates are separate from the main body of software, I’ve decided to release some of them them for free download now.
The complete flowchart template package that ships with FlowBreeze 2.0 are Excel template files (*.xlt) and come in the following flavors:

Cross-functional / deployment flowchart […]

Looking back at some of my earlier flowcharts, I can only think to myself, “Man these things are ugly”. So I hand selected some of my uglier flow chart symbol formats. Hopefully the image below conveys why the Flow Chart Symbol Style Sheet is a must for flowcharting in Excel:

Do you…

Like colorful flow charts but hate the time it takes to make them?
Know good looking color schemes when you see them but have the artistic skills of a caveman?
Want a free and easy way to spruce up your Excel flow charts and process maps?

Yeah, me too. So I created the Flow Chart Styles Cheat […]

Why would I want to make flowcharts?
This is a surprisingly common question I get asked ever since I started BreezeTree Software. To me it’s a no-brainer. I spent most of my career working on process improvement, and flowcharts and Pareto charts did most of the heavy lifting. There’s nothing like visualizing a process to help […]

Sometimes you need a drawing shape that isn’t included in the standard Microsoft Office set of shapes. Maybe you need to add header blocks to all your process shapes. Maybe you need to need to add one of those little speed bumps to your flow lines to tell intersecting lines apart. Or, maybe you’d like […]

When I read The E-Myth Revisited, I have to admit my first impression was “What a load of crap!” After all, it takes 200 pages to say what could be said in less than 10. I’m busy. I don’t have time for that.
Through analogies to the world of McDonald’s franchises and small bakeries alike, […]

If you ever take a class that teaches formal flowcharting, they might teach you that all flowcharts start off with a Trigger Event. A Trigger Event is an action that gets the process started. A trigger event for an order processing flowchart could be “Customer places order”. A trigger even for a payment processing flowchart […]

In the past I have written a number of articles on how to flowchart with Excel. While I will continue to do so in the future, I will be switching more and more to creating flowcharting video tutorials, which I’ve dubbed “Flowtorials”.
Since I’m no USC Film School grad, the Flowtorials will be rough cut in […]

I have a back log of articles I’ve written that mostly just need screen shots and some final polishing up. So once again, I’m blogging about new Excel flowcharting articles I’ve posted.
The first article is How to Make Flow Charts in Excel. It provides a good overview of the basics to creating flow charts in […]

Hyperlinks are one of those things you love even when you don’t realize it. Click a link and bam! - you’re there. Open a document, browse to a web page, or launch your email. Did you know you can even use them to hop around an Excel flowchart?
You can and it’s pretty easy to do.
This […]

A flowchart is a great way to visually depict a process, but if you want to analyze it, step it up to a process map. What are process maps? They’re a Six Sigma version of flowcharts that add attributes to each flowchart process step. Typical attributes include cycle time, defects per unit, delay time, ownership […]

The first time you play around with the flowchart tools in Excel 2007 (aka Excel 12) you can’t but wonder about the whole “Substance over Style” maxim. Sometimes Style is pretty cool, too.
I used the on-line demo to take these screenshots, so there are some visual artifacts. Also, I didn’t line up one of the […]

Well, not really. But it’s been a week since I started this blog, and you may be wondering where all the posts are? They’re coming, they’re coming. I’ve got two posts I’m working on - a quick review of the flowchart tools in Office 12 (aka Office 2007) and an intro to scripting VBA in […]