Peltier Tech Charts for Excel: Conversation with Jon Peltier

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Jon Peltier is a master of leveraging the power of Excel to produce and simplify complex solutions in engineering, finance, and marketing. Jon holds a Doctor of Science degree from MIT in Metallurgy; his background includes Manufacturing, Statistics, Total Quality, and Six Sigma; and he knows more about Excel charts than practically anyone.

Jon has been a full-time Excel developer since 2004; his services include custom Excel solutions and a popular Excel add-in which provides charting capabilities which are not built into Excel. Jon has a popular blog with hundreds of tutorials on Excel charts and VBA automation, he offers training in advanced Excel charting and programming, and he has received Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional award every year since 2001.

In this conversation, Jon discusses his Peltier Tech Charts add-in for Excel.

Geetesh: What inspired you to create the Peltier Tech Charts for Excel add-in, and how has it evolved from the earliest version to what it is today?

Jon: I’ve been using computers to visualize data since before Excel even existed. I had no package that would accept raw data and extract a nice chart. But I had a small HP desktop computer with a pen plotter. I would write a program that had commands to draw the elements of a chart: move pen to X1, Y1; put pen down; move pen to X2, Y2; lift pen; repeat for the thousands of tiny line segments that comprise a chart.

In about 1992, I started using Excel, which had built-in chart capabilities, as well as programmatic access to these capabilities. After learning to use Excel manually to create and format charts, I learned to program Excel to do the same, which saved a lot of time and made my output consistent. This was especially useful when creating chart types that must be tediously constructed because Excel doesn’t support them directly.

About 15 years ago, I launched my first commercial Excel program, Peltier Tech Waterfall Chart Utility, when I realized that many people use waterfall charts, but few wanted or were able to construct them by themselves. Soon after that I released the Peltier Tech Box and Whisker Chart Utility, and eventually I offered a half dozen small utilities. I even had Mac versions of a couple of these version 1 utilities.

The next step was combining these small programs into the Peltier Tech Chart Utility, which had separate Windows and Mac versions. I added more features and combined the Mac and Windows versions into Peltier Tech Charts for Excel 3. I began adding more features, including ways to format existing charts and worksheets, and Charts for Excel 4 continued this expansion. Charts for Excel 5, released in June 2025, is the most advanced version to date, with three ribbon tabs full of features.

Geetesh: Which chart types or features in your add-in do you think solve the biggest limitations of native Excel charts?

Jon: The biggest pain point my software addresses is the difficulty of creating nonstandard charts. The process includes building an appropriate data arrangement, constructing the chart, and formatting the chart elements. Excel beginners, and even intermediate users, throw up their hands at the convoluted protocols. Charts for Excel hides this complexity behind a button and shortens the time to the duration of a button click, just like making a regular chart.

Microsoft has added several nonstandard charts to Excel, including waterfall charts, box plots, histograms, and Pareto diagrams, which Peltier Tech also offers; but the special Microsoft versions are not as flexible as mine, and don’t even offer all the regular features of standard Excel charts.

There are many other features that take the pain out of using Excel charts. Managing chart data is hard, but Charts for Excel provides a find-and-replace feature to edit chart series formulas in one or more charts in one go. Another feature allows you to select one or more series in a chart and move the data range by a number of rows and columns; this is useful if you copy a chart in order to plot a different block of data. You can add data labels to the last point of all your series; you can add custom error bars easily; you can switch the X and Y values in one or more series; you can resize and align multiple charts.

Geetesh: Many users need to transfer Excel charts into PowerPoint for presentations. How does your add-in support or streamline this workflow?

Jon: Peltier Tech Charts for Excel creates regular Excel charts with customized data layouts and formatting that result in their desired appearance. People are already familiar with how Excel charts work, and how they work in PowerPoint (and Word), and my add-in supports users’ familiarity.

One thing that bothered me about using Excel charts in PowerPoint was the tedious process of copying a chart, switching apps, pasting, switching back, copying again, and so forth. Back in 2002 I figured out how to programmatically copy and paste charts from Excel into PowerPoint or Word, reducing the time to transfer 4 charts from a minute or so into a single button click. I’ve improved this feature and added it to Charts for Excel. It isn’t available on a Mac unfortunately, because of the way Microsoft has sandboxed the individual apps in MacOS.

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