Latest news

We have just released two new versions of Rainbow Analyst for the New Year! Both the Professional and the Personal versions have been upgraded:

• The new Professional version 6.0 is fully integrated with Microsoft’s Ribbon interface (for Excel and Office 2007), and it incorporates other improvements which we think represent overall a major advance in usability. For more details see below and on other pages.
• The new Personal version (version 3.4) now incorporates Inter-Sheet Logic and Comparison functions as well as other improvements, and it is still completely free for personal, non-commercial use.

You can download and try out both versions on our Download page; and if you’re a spreadsheet professional using Excel 2003 or earlier, we are continuing to offer our well-established Professional version 5.1.

If you’re currently an individual (single licence) user of Rainbow Analyst Professional version 5.1, you can upgrade to version 6.0 without charge. If you are a corporate (site licence) user, please contact us for upgrade information.

Many professional Excel users have continued to use Excel 2003 rather than migrating to the completely new Ribbon interface in Excel 2007. However, in Rainbow Analyst Professional version 6.0 we have recognised that an increasing number are making the move, and we have upgraded Rainbow Analyst to take full advantage of the Ribbon interface.

The new version version occupies a separate “Rainbow” tab on the Ribbon (click above to see the full-size image), which has allowed us to arrange and group Rainbow’s functions much more clearly than on the previous drop-down menu. There is also a “supertip” for each function which briefly explains its use when you hover the mouse over it.

The new version has also enabled us to implement interactive functionality in place of two Rainbow features that used to involve a slightly clunky use of Excel worksheets. The first such feature is the set of cell mapping options that determine how Rainbow colours or maps different types or groups of cells. You can now view and interactively edit all these options from the Cell Mapping button on the Ribbon (as above). And if you have created a Rainbow map and want to check what the different colours mean, you can now do so quickly and easily by clicking the Cell Mapping button.

The other Rainbow function that is now interactive is the User Guide. We realised that most users were not making much use of this, and so we have now made available nearly all sections of the User Guide in the form of context-sensitive help, which can be accessed from the new Help button on nearly all dialog boxes.

In addition to these changes, we have also included a number of other minor enhancements:

• a date and time stamp on all reports (as shown on our Example page;
• a message advising when the Compare Worksheets function has not found any matching sheets to compare;
• improvements in the way Rainbow deals with protected sheets and chart sheets.

So if you’re using Excel 2007, go to our Downloads page and try version 6.0 for yourself!

We are delighted to add another 5-star rating, this time from Qweas.com, to the awards mentioned in our last news item a couple of months ago.

We’re also working on the next release of Rainbow Analyst Professional, which will take full advantage of the Office Ribbon, so watch this space for further news. (And please let us know if there are specific features you’d really like to see included in future releases!)

Following the inclusion of Rainbow Analyst in the Softpedia software database (see earlier news item), Rainbow Analyst Professional has now been awarded 5 Stars at GearDownload.com as well as at BestShareware.net.

These are unsolicited ratings, and we are delighted at this further recognition of the quality of our product.

We have just released version 5.1 of Rainbow Analyst Professional, and the main news about this release is that it is compatible with Microsoft Excel 2007. We have fixed a few issues that made previous releases incompatible with Excel 2007, so you can now use Rainbow Analyst Professional with the latest version of Microsoft Office.

Version 5.1 does not directly use Microsoft’s Ribbon interface, but it appears inside an Add-Ins tab on the Ribbon, where you can access the Rainbow menu and toolbar. The steps for installing and trouble-shooting Rainbow Analyst under Office 2007 are quite different from previous versions of Excel, so we have now included full details of the Office 2007 procedures on other pages of our site.

If you currently have a single-user licence for version 5.0, you can download and install version 5.1 for free from the Download page of our website. If you have a corporate site licence, please contact us for details of how to upgrade.