Comments and suggestions for Analytica docs

Revision as of 00:43, 18 February 2016 by Bbecane (talk | contribs)


Requested content

Suggestions and requests for additional content you'd like to see covered in the Analytica wiki.

If you can write something yourself, please do so. Put it in the page that seems most appropriate -- or add a new page. If not, add your request here, and hopefully someone else will do so.

  • Explain better how to use Intelligent Arrays effectively.
  • How do I go about translating an Excel spreadsheet into Analytica?
  • How do I decide which Edition of Analytica to use?

General reorganization and clean up

Typography and format

  • Code, usually Analytica expressions, use the format markup. This looks fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but the code shows up in small font on Chrome. See if we can find a way to fix this. One method is simply to use a space at the start of each line, which is the standard way to markup code.
Like this. 
It puts the text into an indented box

Tables

Most tables use an ugly format with two lines separating each cell, like this: 


Let's change all these to use class="wikitable", which looks like this:
Year → 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Earnings→ 4.5M 5.6M 6.6M 7.9M 9.0M 10.1M


See Associative_vs._Positional_Indexing for more examples.

New in which release?

  • Many features say which release introduced them as in "New in Analytica 4.3", usually at the top of the page. This information often goes back to releases long past and is of no interest to most users. In most cases, we can just delete this information if the version is older than the last release -- e.g. release 4.4 after release 4.6. For the last release, or in rare cases where older releases may be of interest to some users, let's move this information to the end of the page under subhead "New in which release?". For example:

This feature was introduced in Analytica 4.3, modified with a new option Gorp in Analytica 4.4.

Reorganizing

There is lots of useful information in Analytica wiki, but it's not always easy to find. There is considerable scope for reorganizing it to make stuff easier to find. Here are some ideas for doing that.

Creating Arrays (Tables) This contains 8 pages that follow Chapter 5 from the Analytica Tutorial, a rather old version according the the screenshots (dated Sep 2007). It's not clear what the value is of having this in the Analytica wiki, since it's more accessible in the Tutorial. If we want to retain in wiki, it should be updated, and given links from each page to the next. Otherwise, let's just delete it.


Home page

  • Reorganize the links into logically related groups with subheadings.
  • Rearrange the links into two columns.
  • Use a smaller Analytica logo.

Index pages

There are several pages like the home page Analytica User FAQs that are simply a list of links. Preferably

  • The links should be simple text, not headings.
  • There is no need for a local contents section on these pages, unless they contain 100s of links so that they are not all visible without scrolling. In that case, the contents would be links to subheadings organizing groups of links.
  • Unless the name of the link is self-explanatory, there should be a phrase next to each link to explain what kind of material it contains.

ana:test page alpha

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