If you don’t read manuals

Experienced modelers find most Analytica features intuitive. But, it’s helpful to get a good grasp of some key concepts so you can get up to speed rapidly. Here are a few chapters that you might find especially helpful to review.

Chapter	Contents
Building Effective Models	Offers guidelines for creating effective models, distilled from the experience of master modelers. It offers a practical guide for building effective models that are clear, reliable, and focus on what really matters — the decisions, objectives, and key uncertainties. These tips are not specific to Analytica, but we designed Analytica to make them especially easy to follow.
Creating Lucid Diagrams	Gives tips on how to create influence diagrams that are truly lucid and elegant — and how to avoid incomprehensible spaghetti.
Arrays and Indexes	Explains Analytica’s Intelligent Arrays™. After you grasp the essentials, they let you build complex multidimensional models with surprising ease. But, you might find they take a little getting used to, particularly if you have spent a lot of time with spreadsheets or programming with arrays. We recommend that even — perhaps especially — experienced modelers review this chapter.
Expressing Uncertainty	Discusses how to select appropriate probability distributions to express uncertainties. It also provides an overview of how Analytica computes probability distributions using Monte Carlo and other random sampling methods, and your options for controlling and displaying probabilistic values.
Procedural Programming	With Analytica, you can create large and sophisticated models without procedural programming. But, if you really want to write complex procedural functions, read this chapter to understand Analytica as a programming language.