(See "Menu > Help > New Features" in the Steele Expert program)
New User Interface
Yet very familiar. A refreshed interface, with a toolbar you customize. 4 icon sets - Line, Solid, Duotone & Color - plus a choice of icon size, in Global Options. Pick whichever looks best to you on your screen. Plus Color Themes for the entire application: The Light theme keeps near-white chrome that steps back and lets the page carry the color. The Slate theme frames it in cool grey a shade darker.
Back and Forward buttons
A page history: walk through the pages you have visited the same way as in an internet browser.
Color Palettes
Color palettes for graphs and tables - 40 for graphs, 6 for tables - chosen by name in the object's own Options dialog, previewed live as you make changes. The typeface is chosen separately, so any palette works with any font.
Restyle
Restyle a report in one action. Choose a table palette, a graph palette, a typeface and a size; the page is recolored and typeset together, previewing as you choose. Works on a single report or on a whole folder of reports.
Custom Professional Fonts
New included typefaces made for reports. Steele Sans Condensed and variations ship with the program for a refined look, and no fonts are installed on your computer.
Portfolios can contain portfolios
Put a portfolio inside another and it rolls up like any holding - so a client's accounts each get their own total, the client gets a grand total, and every report, graph and ranking treats them the same as an individual fund or benchmark.
Print Preview
See the page as it will look out of your printer before you print it. No more discovering a layout problem on paper, especially for long tabular reports. One command - Ctrl+P - opens a window showing the actual pages as they will print, with every print setting on the same dialog.
Distinguish built-in vs your customized templates
Change one of our built-in reports and Steele Expert offers to save it as your own customized copy - so later releases improve our templates without touching yours.
Setup confirms your new data arrived
If the database cannot be replaced because of a reason on your system, it tells you at once, rather than leaving you working on last month's figures if you don't notice the "Data As Of" date.
Auto Update
Steele Expert updates itself. It checks for a newer program version when it starts and offers to install it. Your databases, notebooks and portfolios are left exactly as they are.
Improved Help system
Now you can have the full Users Guide with its context sensitive help side by side with the Steele Expert application to assist you to do anything you set your mind to.
Easy report frame & margins on & off
Turn the page margins and/or frame on or off easily for each report for more space to view the actual data.
Steele Expert is now a 64-bit application
It uses the full memory of your computer, and is much, much faster in portfolio and other calculations.
Point a notebook at a different database
Menu > File > Change notebook database. Every folder, page, report and graph you have built carries across.
Set the database folder
Keep your databases where you like. The database list has a Change Folder button for a network drive or a folder of your own, and it remembers where you were.
Category changes
Under the "Filters" drop-down list in all tabular views the following built-in filters have been added:
Index funds, such as those in the "Index Funds for Benchmarking" built-in securities group can be used instead of indexes for benchmarking and comparisons for more real-world performance comparisons. Several Index Funds faithfully follow their underlying index but, unlike the index, which is a theoretical list of securities and their weights, they provide an investment vehicle that one can actually purchase/hold and its performance does include the cost of managing its operation and maintaining it.
Using an Index Fund instead of its underlying index for comparing performance is a more correct and accurate apples-to-apples comparison of investment vehicle to investment vehicle, instead of a mutual fund that one can invest in (whose performance includes the cost of existing) versus an index which is a hypothetical collection of securities (without any associated costs of acquiring and trading those securities, and managing the operation).
When Modern Portfolio Theory was born, comparing a security to the "market", often referred to a large list of securities such as the S&P 500, Russell 1000/2000/3000, Wilshire 5000. It was highly impractical and expensive to attempt to actually attempt to hold the contents of such benchmarks. Today, however, low-cost Index Funds such as "Fidelity 500 Index" and "Vanguard S&P 500 ETF" represent real-world incarnations of the underlying index that one can actually hold. As a result, for example, it is more accurate and relevant to compare funds in the Large Cap category to those Index Funds. If a considered mutual fund has not been matching (and is not projected to exceed) the performance/risk provided by the Index Fund, the investor can instead actually buy the Index Fund itself.
Category changes
Ultra High-resolution Screens (high-DPI / 4K)
The application now automatically adjusts for ultra high-resolution monitors such as 4K screens. If some components of the application used to display too small and you previously had to manually select a scaling mode for the Steele Expert application, you can improve the program's display by returning that setting to automatic as follows: