A decent navigation tool is a must, may I respectfully point out a shortcoming that the above tools appear to have – they don’t handle indirects, and only BPM sort of handles offsets. What I mean by this is that they don’t locate the “true” reference. They seem to rely on the precedents and dependents. I have successfully developed one that isolates any indirects or offsets to their “true” reference because my review team needed this.

I designed ‘Formula Navigator’ with a colleague after I left the financial modelling team at one of the Big 4 accounting firms.

One could call me bias but I still think ‘Formula Navigator’ is a very useful add-in for model builders and auditors needing to trace precedents and dependents in Excel.

There is a free 7 day trial and I’d be interest to get your feedback.

Blake.

What is your relation to the SpreadsheetGuys? In the interest of getting unbiased comments it would be good for people to know your background as a bit of research on google suggests that you may not be as independent as your previous comments suggest.

It may still be worth looking into the ‘Formula Navigator’ to see how it stacks up against bpmTraverse. Having the best available spreadsheet review tools is critical and we are constantly looking out for better solutions.

Rickard

Yes I have used BPM’s free traverse tool before and Formula Navigator is quite similar, though far better in my opinion and worth the small price tag.

Formula Navigator has some great additional features:
- Sheet navigation buttons which allow you to select a range or multiple ranges and jump to the exact same range/s in adjacent sheets (great for de-bugging or auditing asset portfolio models where there is a silo or template sheet structure)
- A history window to keep track of what cells you’ve been looking at in the spreadsheet.
- A ‘Study Range’ feature which enhances the in-built trace functionality of Excel by allowing you to trace on a range rather than just a single cell (very powerful)

I also find it’s general useability to be better suited to my needs and I like the Re-sizeable floating window!

Blake.

I have not tested this one before – I suppose it is similar to BPM’s bpmTraverse?

http://bpmglobal.com/bpmtravcamp/bpmtraverse.html

BPM’s tool is free and does a good job for this. What are the benefits of the ‘Formula Navigator’ over bpmTraverse? The $9.95 isn’t a staggering amount but would be good to get your views on this.

I personally use a tool called ‘Formula Navigator’ by Spreadsheet Guys for tracing formula and find it to be very good.

It can be downloaded here:
http://www.spreadsheetguys.com/downloads/software/formulanavigator

Regards,

Blake McNaughton