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 …