This program will let you view/download stock data in real time and define portfolios of stocks and monitor their activity and profit/loss; but the WOW-inducing feature is the ability for users to define their own "Stock Indicators" and to have the program automatically deliver alerts based on these. For example, you can tell JStock to alert you by SMS if it finds a stock price that’s at the highest its been for the past 6 months. This may not sound too exciting if you just have one or two stocks that you are interested in, but JStock will do this for hundreds of stocks that you might want to monitor and define in its database. Here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: the main "Real Time Info" tab displays a list of stocks that you can monitor. Although it is pre-populated when you launch the program, note that you can delete stocks from the list and add just the ones you find relevant. Also note that you can select the country of interest and download the entire list of stocks for that country, which is very convenient. If your stock is somehow not showing you can add it to the database individually. JStock will now download price changes in real-time for these, and will even chart . Once you have your list, sorting by column headers can be a great help. I would say, however, that the list is in need of more filtering options (see my wish list below)
• Charting: right click on an individual stock and click "History" to receive an instant 10-year chart for the stock in question showing both stock prices and trade volume. You can also request a candlestick chart. You can limit the range of charted data by simply drawing a rectangle over the time period you are interested in with the mouse.
• Alerts: once you set up your desired "Stock Indicators" (see below) JStock can deliver SMS, Email, or system tray alerts based on these. SMS alerts are 100% free (you need to set up a Google Calendar account and register your mobile number; more info here). Alerts can be sent for stocks in your "real time" list, for an entire country’s stock market, for a particular board such as the NYSE, for a unknown "industries" (I am not sure exactly how JStock comes up with these), or, perhaps most useful, for the stocks that are user-defined in your database (choose "user-defined" industry for this one).
• Stock Indicators: JStock allows you to create your own indicators and use these to generate alerts. A visual editor is built into JStock that allows you to create these without any programming skills; however, it helps to know what you are going after . I simply re-created the indicator that was described in the help section and it was apparent to me just how powerful and versatile these indicators could be. The image to the right shows an alert that will be triggered when the stock’s current last price is the maximum it has been for the past 14 days. Very cool!
• Portfolio Management: this is where you can record transactions that occur on a list of stocks and keep track of your profit and loss. I did not really use this, but I imagine that it would be extremely value added
• Chatting: I was not able to find anyone to chat with; either there were no users online or I set it up incorrectly (although the set-up seemed super easy).

Wish list:

• Tagging: it would be great if you could create custom tags and associate them with stocks (perhaps in the user-defined stocks database entries), and then use these later for filtering/grouping, for alerts, or other operations.
• Filtering: I found it strange that are no means to isolate a stock or group of stocks in a list and view these in isolation. You cannot even type in a stock ticker symbol and filter it out from the list. What would be tremendously value-added is if you could filter each column Excel-style using certain criteria (e.g. only if the Chg% is larger or smaller than a certain value, etc). Of course you can currently create Stock Indicators and filter lists that way, but it would be so much more user-friendly to be able to filter on-the-fly.
• Downloading: ok so I charted the past 12 months for stock x; now can I please download these into CSVl? A strange omission.
• Chart range pre-sets: as in "the past week", "the past 1 month", "2 months", "1 Year", etc., to be selected from a dropown. Another very strange omission.
• Pre-defined indicators: it would be cool if the program with a few "clever" or value added indicators pre-defined, to get people started with indicators.

The verdict: this program one of the best in its category. It could use a streamlining of the user interface to make it more user-friendly, but it makes up for that in the power that it has under the hood and the sheer ambition of its covered functionality. Occasional or regular investors alike will find this program very useful and value added. Highly recommended!

Version Tested: 1.0.4i

Compatibility: Windows/Linux/Mac/Solaris

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 16.5 megs).

What you may not know is that aside from my interest in freeware I am an expert user of MS Excel: macros, VBA automation, the works . I was searching for information on Excel dashboards, which I needed for a project at work, when I stumbled upon this site.

Now I fully realize that the web is chock-full of excellent Excel sites that offer downloadable templates, but in terms of quality this site is definitely in the 90th percentile. This is because of the originality of some of the topics and templates on offer as well as the fact that they are presented with a good degree of simplicity (not to mention given away for free).

My top three five favorite templates:

1. KPI Dashboards with visualizations revisted. See a 6-part tutorial on how this was made starting with part 1 here. See the image to the right for a preview.
2. Using Maps in Excel. Very interesting. Can be customized for your particular needs.
3. Using data filters as chart filters. Simple and elegant.
4. Artistic dashboards in Excel. Very cool. Tutorial available here.
5. Tag clouds in Excel. If only for the sheer originality factor.

I hope Mr. Chandoo (a.k.a Pointy Haired Dilbert) does not mind my linking to the above downloads directly.

Go to the Pointy Haired Dilbert home page, or go straight to the downloads page.

Ever wanted to insert YouTube videos into your PowerPoint presentations? AuthorStream desktop makes it extremely easy to do so. Here are more notes on this program:

• What it does: embeds a YouTube video or images from the web into a PowerPoint presentation, allowing you to place and resize your media on the page as you would any image object. Does NOT download videos, and does NOT save the actual video inside your PowerPoint files.
• User interface: click on the authorStream ribbon (in PowerPoint 2007) to access its functionality. Very straightforward. Note that I did not test on PowerPoint 2003 and am not sure what the interface looks like there.
• Two ways to embed: you can either provide the URL for the YouTube video or image you would like to embed, or otherwise use the built in search functionality (will display search results from Google or Bing image search).
• Sharing your files: you can email or share your Presentations with other users and they will be able to view them without having to have AuthorStream Desktop installed (they will need an internet connection though).
• Uploading: AuthorStream Desktop provides 1-click PowerPoint presentation uploads to the AuthorStream online presentation sharing service, which could come in very handy if you use that service to share your presentations.

Wish list: (or how this program can be even better)

• The ability to embed private video uploaded to hosting services such as DivShare or even incorporating into Powerpoint any standard HTML code used for embedding video into sites/blogs .This would make this software EXTREMELY useful in some settings (conferences, business presentations) where the video content could not be uploaded publicly to YouTube for privacy concerns (note that private YouTube uploads are a headache that requires setting up YouTube contact lists, logging in with a YouTube user ID and other non-practical measures).

The verdict: a great idea that is implemented in a very simple, straightforward way. This software presents a very practical and easy way for many people to use video in PowerPoint presentations by their videos into YouTube and embedding them into their presentations (which has the added benefit of keeping the PowerPoint files small and compact for the purposes of email, etc.) Not to mention the useful opportunity it presents to PowerPoint spammers everywhere

On the other hand AuthorStream Desktop can be so much more useful if it supported embedding FLV videos that are uploaded privately to file hosting services where only the people you share the video link with have access to it (DivShare is the service I use). This would make it possible to use PowerPoint with private video content in professional and business settings where uploading this content publicly to YouTube is not an option.

Version Tested: 1.0.0.1

Compatibility: WinAll. Requires PowerPoint 2007.

Go to the the program page to download the latest version (approx 1.56 megs).

DRoster is what I’d describe as niche software. Not everybody is going to have a use for employee scheduling software, but for those whom do need it, this could be a life saver. I imagine DRoster being a very welcome find for many small businesses or organizations that are burgeoning past the point of being manageable through a simple spreadsheet. Also, I feel it’s nice to be aware of DRoster as it could come in handy for other purposes for those of us who tend to reverse engineer everything and think in work-arounds.

[Editor’s note: this review was written by Freewaregenius contributor Jason H. Check out his tech blog: 404techsupport.com].

DRoster comes in two versions: a traditional application that would be installed on your computer or as a web page that’s accessible from any Internet-enabled device. Each version has a little different feel to it, but both are free. I personally prefer the web version and will cover that in slightly greater depth.

You can use your free DRoster to schedule up to 300 shifts. DRoster will hold up to 300 shifts, but you can continuously use it by deleting old shifts as required. For an unlimited number of shifts, buy DRoster.

DRoster, or ezDRoster for the online version, allows you to create employee schedules that meet all of your requirements. Let’s say you have a front desk that must always be manned and different positions work different shifts. You can handle these sorts of quirks and get a handle on people’s hours, where they’re working from, and avoid schedule conflicts from being under-staffed or over-committing any employees.

Web Version

For the web version, you’ll start off by registering your company and creating a user name for your admin account. From there, start off by creating Locations. These might be different office branches or they could be the different positions that need manned like fry cook, cash register, drive-thru, etc.

Next create Roles. These state the different responsibilities and positions that need filled. You should choose a unique icon to represent each role as well.

Then add Shifts and what days/hours these shifts take place. You can also set what requirements you have for each shift. From the running example in the screenshot, let’s say you require one person doing Phone Support on the night shift. This will throw a little exclamation mark on that shift anytime it is not filled. This way you can make sure somebody is always filling necessary roles.

After you have shifts created, you can add people. These would be the names of employees.

You can only assign one role to each person, so things might get complicated if you have somebody serving double-duty. But, a great thing about the online version, you can assign them a user name and password. Then individuals are able to login and see the schedule. If you make them an Administrator, they’ll have all the same capabilities as you. Otherwise, as a standard user, they’ll be able to login and only view the schedule.

Users can also request unavailable times if you allow it through the web interface. This will allow them to put in a time, say that they have a dentist appointment, and you won’t schedule them to work a shift that overlaps that. You can approve or deny these unavailability requests as the administrator. They’ll show up as pink squareson the schedule and will inform you which shifts are blocked due to this conflict.

This will bring you back to the main dashboard and you can assign individuals through templates or get to the other management areas through the menu bar.

You can see the schedule through three different views. They each allow a different perspective so you can make sure the schedule is correct. When a standard user logs in, they’ll see much the same thing, with the different views but the Manage, Templates, and Add Shift buttons are all disabled. The different views allow you to see:

Detailed View

Weekly View

Person View

The Administrator is able to customize the schedule’s appearance by controlling the Display parameters. So you can specify Military time, date format, and which days. Everybody that logs in will be able to see the Legend from the menu bar. This will explain what the different color codings and icons represent.

The final feature to point out with the web version is the Templates feature. This allows you to create a single day or multi-day template that you can use for new weeks so you don’t have to start from scratch each time. You can apply the template and then make any changes to accomodate different needs or unavailabilities.

Application Version

The application version is much the same as the desktop version but with a different interface and you lose the features of letting employees log in and view the schedule. You set it up in much the same way and then see and set the schedule with different “planners” instead of views.

To make up for the lack of allowing others to login and see the schedule, you can create a variety of reports to print out and post for others to see.

Along with printing, you can export these reports to PDF, BMP, HTML, Text, Excel (OLE, XML), RTF, TIFF image, or JPEG image formats.

Pick your preference for the Web version or the application. Of course, you can try both out since they’re free.

You can download or access the web version at the DRoster website (approx. 5.8 megs for the local installable version).

In good times and bad, a balanced budget and an understanding of your savings and spending are essential. It is also wise to create a budget and stick to it. Wouldn’t it be great if you could manage all of this in one place too? Mint and Quicken Online promise to help achieve this and the price is right: Free! We’ll take a look at both free web services and put them toe-to-toe.

[Editor’s note: this review was written by Freewaregenius contributor Jason H. Check out his tech blog: 404techsupport.com]. 

Mint

Mint is the underdog in this fight. Launched as an entrepreneur’s startup in 2006, Mint has a lot of ground to make up before it can stand on its own when compared to a veteran like Quicken. Mint uses Yodlee to aggregate and consolidate multiple accounts into one place. It can then analyze your accounts and track your spending, savings, investments, loans, and more. Mint currently lists that it can connect to over 7500 financial institutions as of this writing. I have been able to add every account of mine, from car loan to credit card to retirement fund, except my bank accounts. The bank I use is listed in the institutions they can connect to, but for some reason it will not work for me and others list a similar problem with this bank. This strongly devalues the usefulness of Mint for me; between direct deposit and automatic withdrawals, it doesn’t really provide an accurate picture of my finances without capturing my bank accounts. This should be one thing to note when evaluating a service that’s right for you, “do all of my accounts connect?”

Setting up your accounts is a breeze, you just provide your login info for the web access to those sites and then Mint goes and brings all that information into its site for your account. You can do this with relative peace of mind as Mint is secured and vouched for by VeriSign, TRUSTe, and McAfee. The site uses SSL and logs you out after 10 minutes of inactivity.

Once you have your accounts all setup, Mint can go to work and prove that it is more than just an aggregator. Mint provides financial analysis across your accounts for an interesting perspective on your spending habits. With a pie chart that will grow and shrink sections accordingly as you move from one month to another, you can see what categories cost you more money. You can click on a category to “zoom in” and see the actual transactions. This is a cool feature but still has room for improvement. You can look at these categories and see if you’re spending more than you’d like at restaurants, shopping, gifts and any number of sub-categories, including custom ones that you can create. Currently the analysis and categorization is based on each transaction or vendor. I would like to be able to further divide these transactions into their respective parts. I might go shopping at Wal-Mart and spend money in a variety of categories: car, groceries, gifts, health & fitness, and more. At the present, I have to categorize that entire transaction into one category.

Along with analyzing your own spending to see what categories you’re investing a lot into, you can also see how your spending compares to other people by location. You can narrow down to a state or major city. They also provide a breakdown by month and by merchant. Pretty interesting and pretty random.

Mint also keeps track of your investments. It adds a graph to show their performance with comparisons to different metrics like the Dow Jones, S&P 500, or NASDAQ.

Budgeting, the final Mint feature I’ll cover, is also integrated into the service. You can configure a monthly budget for different categories and track how well you’re complying as the month goes on. If you go over budget, have a low balance, a bill due, bank fees, or many more triggers, these can all be configured to send you an e-mail or text message letting you know.

Sometimes, you might not trust a company unless you know how they’re making a profit. Mint is actually up-front with this information: Along with the transactions, trends, and investments tabs, there is another called Ways to Save. This tab contains suggestions and comparisons for credit cards. They then act as a referral and get a pay off from a credit card company if you sign up for one. It’s pretty much out of the way and doesn’t bother you unless you want it to. The information about the credit cards is equally upfront and clear about what you’re getting and Mint tries to find a perfect match for you based on what it knows about you and your spending habits.

Mint also has a nifty blog which breaks down financial ideas and related news stories.

Quicken Online

Quicken has been in the game for a long time. They have had financial software on the market with Quicken Software since 1984. (It’s as old as I am!) Quicken Online is a free “software-as-a-service” offering and has only been around in late 2007 when it went into private beta. They have no ads and make no promos for credit cards like Mint in order to generate revenue. I have to assume that Quicken Online is offered free to get the Quicken name out there. Quicken, similar to Mint, also uses SSL throughout the site and is secured by TRUSTe. You are automatically signed out after 20 minutes of inactivity to protect your account. They support more than 5000 different financial institutions as of November 2008, but I was actually able to successfully add all of my accounts (including the bank accounts that Mint could not) providing a complete and accurate picture of my finances as Quicken Online similarly aggregates all of your accounts for viewing and analysis.  Quicken Online’s dashboard similarly provides a summary of all your financial balances at the moment and also includes a little countdown until the next payday, in case you’re living paycheck to paycheck.

Along with the summary, it tries to be a little more predictive than Mint. You can set the recurring rate of some events, like monthly rent, bi-annual car insurance, and so on. This is helpful for those things that don’t necessarily come with due dates, but takes a little teaching to get straightened out with the right frequency. Quicken Online also has a pie chart and spending trend analysis so you can track which categories are getting your money. The images seem to be a little more static than Mint’s rendering where the motion helps emphasize a change in spending habits from month to month. You can still click on sections of the pie chart for closer analysis or just hover over for more information beyond the color coding. Unfortunately Quicken Online has the same issue as Mint by categorizing an entire transaction instead of being able to break it up into more accurate categories. A plus for QO, is the fact that you can move the slider to an arbitrary amount of time. With Mint it is fixed at one month length from the 1st of the month to the last day. Quicken Online allows you to move the slider at the top to any number of days starting at any point in a month. This flexibility is nice for when your bills and income doesn’t flow with the calendar.

You can also add a budget per category if you’re trying to hedge your spending. You can set a budget for each category and a total and then configure alerts to contact you if you near your budget. You can also configure alerts for a weekly digest, your remaining balance, if a checking account goes below a certain balance, upcoming bills, a credit card balance goes beyond a custom amount, or a particularly large expense clears one of your accounts.

Summary

Choosing between the two of these services is difficult to me. At the same time, it’s a lot of work to keep them both accurate with categorizing the same transactions twice (though they do learn) and other account maintenance. Unfortunately, Mint currently does not handle my bank account properly. If it did, Mint would win hands down. The Mint interface is or at least feels more versatile and adaptive. It’s also more friendly-looking while Quicken Online offers a more professional feel to it. Extra Features

• Mint has an iPhone application and mobile alerts.
• Quicken also has a mobile version, you can activate it after they text you a unique key. You can text them to retrieve your balances or visit the mobile version of the website.

If neither Mint or Quicken Online sound like they’re what you’re looking for, check out some of the other free competition:

• Wesabe – Feature: Upload exported bank files instead of setting up login info
• Geezeo – Feature: Community-based (think throwing social networking into the mix) financial control
• Buxfer – Feature: Handles split charges; keep track and shuffle debt among a group of friends.
• Thrive – Feature: Personal financial advice to help you achieve your goals
• PageOnce – Feature: Only an online account aggregator, limited features for personal financial management.

Hopefully you’ll be able to find a service that works for you, helps you remain organized, and keep a handle on your finances to save you money.

Version tested: 1.35

Powerbullet can create animated flash presentations containing text, graphics, and sound. It features a drag and drop interface and a host of pre-packaged animation and transition effects. Results can be viewed in a browser or exported into a self-running executable playable on any computer.

The learning curve: spend some time experimenting with this software and you’ll figure out how to do most of the things you are interested in in very short order. Powerbullet has a very different feel to it from MS Powerpoint, though (using Powerbullet feels somewhat like working with a word processor).

The user interface: there are a number of toolbars with buttons stacked on top of the page; however, you can right click on an object to instantly edit its properties, set animation effects, create an HTML link, or even edit an object’s HTML. This makes interacting with objects extremely easy, and really makes a world of difference in the user-friendliness department.
If I could change anything I would give this program a bit of a makover in terms of how the interface looks. For being essentially a design software it needs to be a little bit more sleek-looking, in my opinion.

Creating a presentation: in puttting a presentation together you have to be mindful and manage the timing of events; for example, if you want a certain bulleted text to appear after a bunch of graphics have settled on-screen, you will have to look at the time offset from the beginning for the first event (the graphics), and make sure to set the subsequent event (bulleted text) to start after the first one has run its duration. This is mostly a matter of trying things out and tweaking them until they work, but the program does not provide any bird’s-eye view of the events across a timeline that would make this process much easier.

Animations: One of the Powerbullet’s strengths is the range of pre-built animations that can be applied to any object (I counted 41, excluding ’none’). For example, you can set your list of bullet points so that it flies in from left hand side or bounce around the screen before settling into their final resting place.

Transitions: there are 4 pre-defined transitions that can be used whenever you exit a slide and enter another one (you can set different transitions for the outgoing and ingoing slides).

Other tools: Powerbullet provides a voice recorder tool and can aquire images from a scanner straight from the application itself.

Wish list (or how this program can be even better): what this program is missing is tools that allow you to manage the project from a macro-level, as follows:

• It would be great to have a thumbnail view of all created slides that would allow you to drag and drop these to change their order, delete them or duplicate them, etc. (Similar to what exists in MS Powerpoint).
• An event timeline tool that lists all events within a slide and their duration within a graphical representation of overlapping bars or some-such. It would be even cooler if this hypothetical tool would allow you to change the timing (beginning and duration) on the graphical representation itself.
• My final wish list item: the ability to preview slides within the application rather than having to export to SWF first.

The Verdict: I like this program because (a) its powerful, (b) its free, (c) its fairly easy to come to grips with, and (d) the flash animations are application independent, and can be run as executables on any computer or OS. Powerbullet could be significantly better, but until that happens I can still say that this is competent freeware that, in a pinch, is good enough to get the job done.

Compatibility: Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP; also requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher.

Go to the download page to get the latest version (approx 2.7 megs). Also visit the program home page.

Rating

Version tested: 2.4

Imagicon is a small program that performs image to icon conversions as well as image conversions across all the supported formats (BMP, PNG, JPG and ICO). It features a simple drag and drop interface.

I was looking for a simple program to convert PNG’s and JPG’s into Icon (ICO) files and found this one. I chose to post this program over a number of others primarily because it supported converting a a number of popular image formats (BMP, PNG, and JPG), whereas most of the others I looked at typically converted a single format only (usually PNG). Here are some notes on this program:

• Simple interface: first define the output image settings you want (convert to icons by default), then simply drag and drop an image or multiple images onto the program dialog for the conversion to take place.
• Fast: very efficient conversions compared to other image-to-icon programs that I have tested.
• Icon settings: 32×32 by default, but can be set to any icon size setting (16×16, 48×48, 128×128, 64×64). You can also enable/disable transparency support within icons.
• Convert across formats: you can (a) set output format to any of BMP, PNG, or JPG instead of ICO, (b) set it to reduce image size to a percentage of the original, (c) set to custom pixel size instead of percentage, and choose whether or not to preserve proportions, (d) choose to flip the resulting image vertically or horizontally, and (e) a ni-filtering option can be selected that can "smooth out" image output.
• Customizable: the color of the program as well as the image used as background in the drag and drop dialog can be changed.

This program does what it does really well and has a nice efficient interface. My personal interest in it is as an image to icon converter but it can certainly be used as a small, easy to use image converter as well. Recommended.

Compatibility: Windows 98/2000/ME/NT/XP/Vista.

Go to the program home page to get the latest version (approx 944K).

Rating

Version tested: 1.5.00 beta

SmallStock is a memory-resident program that monitors user-selected stocks on the NASDAQ exchange in real time and displays alerts in the system tray whenever a set of user-defined criteria occurs. It can also track your portfolio of stocks and report on any incurred profits or losses.

This program was created for the casual, non-professional trader as a means to track and report changes on stocks of interest. It is extremely intuitive and easy to use straight away with no learning curve to speak of. Here are some notes on this program:

• Watch list: allows you to add any NASDAQ stock to your watch list.
• Alerts: user-defined alerts that pop up in the system tray area based on any/all of the following 5 criteria: price rises or falls to a certain value, increases or decreases to a certain value, or volume of trading exceeds a certain level. (See second screenshot for alerts).
• Alert frequency: for any of your criteria, you could ask to be alerted every time the event occurs, to be alerted once a day, or just a single, non-recurring alert.
• Stock selection: what I like about this program is that stocks are selected via a pull-down menu which is filtered by whatever you enter in the box for ’stock name’. For example, if you’re typing in "Google" it will immediately jump down to the Google entry by the time you have typed in "goo". You will easily be able to select your stock without having to look up its stock symbol.
• Ad-hoc stock data lookup: you can look up a stock’s info on a one-time basis without adding it to your watch list. Info includes percent change, price, volume, low and hight price points for the day. Smallstock does not offer more extensive information than that, does not retrieve historical information, and does not support any historical trend charting (if you want that you might want to try the excellent Widdly).
• Importing and exporting: you can easily save your watch list and share it with others if you want.

My wish list (or how this program can be even better).

• Support for markets beyond just the NASDAQ. The stock selection dialog has a little pull down menu for markets with ’NASDAQ’ being the only selectable option. I am guessing that future versions will allow for more market indexes.

If you are interested in tracking stocks this is a great little program that can keep you informed in real time. It is lightweight and doesn’t consume a lot of resources and is very well designed in general. Kudos to the programmers for giving us this nice little tool absolutely free.

Compatibility: Windows 2003, XP, VISTA. Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 (will be downloaded automatically during setup if not installed yet)

Go to the download page to get the latest version (approx 2.19 megs). Also visit the program home page.

Version tested: 4.1

Engauge Digitizer is an open-source program designed to convert charts or maps provided as images into numeric data which can be exported as CSV and manipulated using Excel or other programs.

Though the internet offers large amounts of data on every conceivable subject, in many cases numeric data is presented in a chart that is only accessible for viewing as an image file. Engauge Digitizer offers a quick and easy way to import all sorts of charts (including maps) and convert these into a very good approximation of the actual data they represent. Here are some notes on this program:

• This program requires the user to manually identify certain basic information on the graph. For example, you will need to click on 3 points on the 2 axes of a graph (as well as their intersection point) and manually enter the values for these.
• Engauge supports 2 modes of data identification; manual digitization and automatic digitization, as explained below.
• Manual digitization, as the name implies, involves going over a chart and manually placing enough points on it as to eventually have an adequate representation of it. In this scenario you need not worry so much about removing unwanted information from the image since you placing the points yourself anyway.
• Automatic digitization is an option whereby the program will automatically hone in on a graph (or large segments of a graph), or you can outline a point on the graph and ask Engauge to hone in on all points that look like it. For the program to do these things correctly you need to eliminate all visual data that is not part of the graph or chart you are after. You can do this by using Engauge’s own filters, of which 2 (descretize and grid removal) are available. (You can also do a lot of cleaning up externally using an image editing program).
• You can use the "descretize" filter to make the chart/graph more discernable, especially if the color scheme in the image did not translate very well in Engauge’s monochromatic environment. The descretize dialog has many tools/options to do this, unfortunately it is somewhat confusing and unfriendly, but some experimentation will go a long way to get good results.
• I like the "grid removal" filter better. It does precisely that, but also features options that can eliminate other unwanted/unneeded data within a chart. These include removing all information that is of a certain color which you can select with a dropper tool, removal of lines parallel to the axes based on a few guidelines, and removal of pixels close to regularly spaced gridlines.
• Tutorial: an excellent tutorial is included that should get you going in no time at all.

Engauge offers some sophisticated abilities, including automatic curve tracing (for line plots), automatic point matching (for point plots), and automatic axes matching. It also can handle many types of graphs including cartesian, polar, linear as well as logarithmic graphs. And it is provided 100% free.

However, I cannot help but think that Engauge would be so much better with a few user-interface related improvements. The descretize filter dialog is overly complex and can profit greatly from some streamlining (after playing around with this one for a while, it occurred to me that I could get better results more quickly simply by cleaning the graph manually using an image editing program). The addition of a simple undo button for when you misplace a point or segment will also enhance this program significantly, as would an optional "zoom" function that can help when manually identifying points.

Having said that I will also say that if you put the time into it you will find that this program actually has a fairly short learning curve. And if you need the functionality that it provides it can produce excellent results.

Compatibility: Cross platform (WinAll, Linux).

Go to the program page to get the latest version (approx 6.97megs).

Version tested: 2.05 beta

Widdly is a free tool that allows you to download and analyse data for stocks, indices, macroeconomical data, currencies, funds, and other financial instruments. It is designed to allow the publication of financial analysis on the widdly.com website and sharing these with a community of users. The tool has a heavy focus on charting and provides numerous charting-related features and options. You can publish your own analyses and/or browse other people’s, with the basic objective of creating a forum-style conversation where members of the community rate the analysis and leave comments.

Widdly.com is aims to bring together a community of financial-analysis-minded users who can publish and share financial analyses. The idea is that users can rate the various published analyses within a 5-star rating system in order to validate the published content. These analyses consist of elaborately constructed charts which may or may not have a sentence-long caption underneath. You have to create a user account to download and the tool will automatically log in every time you use it.

What’s really cool about this program is the ability to instantly download historic data going back 3 years for any conceivable stock and/or financial instrument. You can choose from a multitude of different chart types and charting options; the array of charting possibilities is nothing short than dizzying. These include moving averages, time-series forecasting, trends charting, standard deviation and variance charting. volatility charting, volume/volume based charting, and many, many more. I should also mention the option to outline trends or identify significant event manually on the chart itself, much like you would with any drawing program. What I really like is the ability to overlay the charts for multiple stocks for comparison. Of course you can save any analysis or chart that you build and update it with more current data as you go along. You can also export downloaded data into CSV for analysis with another application such as MS Excel.

I’ve spent some time on the Widdly.com website looking at various charts and analyses. I will confess that, although I have some interest in investing and in keeping an eye on the market trends of a handful of companies, I could not help but feel intimidated by published charts (these, to my eye, look more like Jackson Pollock abstract paintings than anything else). Captions or explanations of charts were often missing or, when they did exist, seemed awfully short. In most cases they also were not in English.

Another question I had is whether there was a real added value in these charts beyond the outlined trends; although in theory the social rating system is supposed to provide an answer to this question, it did not seem that the number of people who did provide ratings was high enough to provide a satisfying answer. I also wonder about the make-up of this community and who these people were: to what extent were there experts, amateur investors, novices with little knowledge of financial markets, or even spammers who wanted to generate hype?. Of course I realize, in the end, that these questions are not particular to Widdly but apply to any virtual community, and that the assumption is that with the growth of a community the collective ’genius’ will add more overall value than any of the drawbacks inherent in it.

All in all this is a really powerful tool that will appeal to both the novice and professional. The only drawback, I would say, is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of documentation or extensive information/help either in the application itself or online. On the other hand the program is surprisingly intuitive, and manages to handle a complex subject in a very user friendly manner. Widdly provides a world of (financial) information on-demand and a host of powerful tools for charting and analysis – all for free.

Compatibility: WinAll

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 340k).

Version tested:  1.2.25

SysSense is a system-tray based app that will retrieve data periodically from Google Adsense accounts and display real time notifications of your latest account information.

If you have a website (or websites) where you use Google Adsense you might want to check this one out. SysSense is resides in your system-tray and updates you on various account metrics. You can use it for multiple accounts (it allows for an unlimited number of accounts).

SysSense will periodically flash your information in a notification balloon (see screenshot) or can be told to refresh at will and display the latest adsense numbers – no need to log into your account(s) in a browser.

This app has some pretty nifty reporting capabilities as well. It can create a bar chart in a little window (see second screenshot) for a number of metrics (impressions, clicks, ecpm, ctr, and earnings), for different Adsense products and ad channels, across different date ranges. You cannot do cross charting of multiple metrics, but as far as I am concered SysSense is already going well above and beyond the call of duty for such a small program.

If you’re an Adsense addict (you know who you are) this is the program you’ve been looking for.

Go to the program page for the latest version.

Version tested:  1.0

Textwedge is a program that splits text files (including CSV files) into smaller chunks.

Textwedge does this row-by-row in a number of different ways:

• Split text by “number of lines per chunk” (e.g. you could set row count per file to be 30,000 if that’s what you need)
• Split text by “chunk size” in bytes
• Split text by lines containing a certain search string (you can define multiple search strings for this one)
• You can also filter out rows containing certain search strings.
• Textwedge will (optionally) preview what it will do before doing it by marking out different chunks and/or lines that will be filtered out with different colors.

A lot of people ask about how to exceed the 65536 row limit in an Excel spreadsheet. The answer simply is: you can’t. At least not in Excel 2003 (the upcoming Excel 12 (2007) will feature 1,048,576 rows). As someone who works with data I often have to split .txt or .csv files into 65536 rows, which is the maximum that MS Excel can work with. I typically would do this with VBA Macros, but there are disadvantages to this: (a) the Macros often take a long time processing (b) they often break down if the file size being processed is too big. Textwedge has proven fast, efficient, and powerful in handling this task (see screenshot).

Go to the Sourceforge Project Page to download the latest version. Also check out the author’s home page.