Hello,
I am developing a free heat map add-in for excel 2003+. As there seems to be a requirement for this capability I would like to let everyone know that I intend to provide it. Eventually I want to release the Heat Map as a stand-alone self-installing exe
under a GNU license. Users would download the exe installer, run it, and be able to use the heat map program in any open excel application on their system by clicking a button on the ribbon.
There are several advantages to my heat map that excel does not provide currently, to my knowledge.
A) The cell formatting is permanently colored so the data can be removed for easier visualization without eliminating the heat map. With conditional formatting the data must be present in the formatted cells to retain their spectrum colors. Furthermore, to my knowledge the formatted area cannot be copied to another space on the worksheet to extract the formatting alone.
B) With heat map color spectrums are exact (e.g., red->yellow->green in 3D vector space). Compare my output to the excel conditional formatting. In both cases I used the same colors but conditional formatting created a dulled output.
c) I intend to add capability to save heat maps as image files (.bmp), and to insert the heat map into a new worksheet with an output summary. This allows for easy management of the heat map output.
See link below for example. I still need to be verified for some reason so I had to break the link. Fix the link and paste it into your browser.
oi59.tinypic.com*FIX ME*/2dluog6.jpg