We recently announced the winner of the June / July round of the Resolver One Spreadsheet Challenge. The winner was Suresh Shanmugam’s excellent Sudoku solver spreadsheet that integrates the Microsoft Solver Foundation into Resolver One. Alongside the winning spreadsheet we had some excellent entries, many of which are available to download from the Resolver Exchange.Over the next week or so I’ll be posting blog entries highlighting some of the competition entries. The first of these is one of my favourites, a spreadsheet by Greg Bray:

•  Resolver One and WPF Chart Example

One of the big new features of Resolver One 1.6, which is now in beta with a final release due in a few days, is the ability to put images into ordinary worksheets. Alongside the ability to combine cells (expanded cells) it makes adding charts to your spreadsheets simpler. At the moment it only supports ordinary images, but of course with Resolver One you can use .NET components to create a more sophisticated solution. In this spreadsheet Greg Bray uses a WPF charting component, created by Li Gao, to show interactive charts from data stored inside Resolver One. The chart is displayed by clicking the ‘Chart’ button on the main worksheet. Once displayed you can zoom in and out on the data and moving the mouse highlights the values at the point on the X axis that mouse is over. The screenshot below shows what it looks like.

As an added bonus the spreadsheet includes a help button that brings up a help interface. The individual help pages are created from HTML and even include an embedded YouTube video showing off the charting component!

This is a great way of building instructions or a tutorial into a spreadsheet. All the code for the charting component and the help system are included in the spreadsheet download from the exchange.