Excel and Analytica
Many people use Analytica to build quantitative models as an alternative to Microsoft Excel, because they find Analytica's influence diagrams make for more transparent models, Intelligent Arrays provide greater flexibility and power, and/or they want to treat uncertainty using Analytica's Monte Carlo tools. But, it's also common to use Analytica in combination with Excel -- using a spreadsheet to provide inputs into Analytica and/or a spreadsheet to save, share, and analyze results.
Converting a spreadsheet into Analytica
If you have have a spreadsheet that is too cumbersome, opaque, or inflexible, you may wish to translate it into Analytica. This is a great way to learn Analytica for a new user. It's also a powerful way to verify the validity of a spreadsheet by comparing the results of the Analytica model with the spreadsheet. This process often surfaces errors that were hidden in the spreadsheet.
If you plan to convert a spreadsheet into Analytica, you should consult Excel to Analytica Translation, a step-by-step guide for the process. You may also use Excel to Analytica Mappings, which gives Analytica functions or expressions that are equivalent for most Excel functions.
Integrating Analytica with Excel spreadsheets
Analytica plays nice with Excel. It offers several ways of reading inputs from a spreadsheet into Analytica and writing results back to a spreadsheet:
- Often the simplest way is to use a set of standard Analytica functions that read from and write to Excel spreadsheets. These can open and close a spreadsheet, read from or write to a cell, cell range, named range, or tab. They can read and write formulas and formats as well as simple numbers or text values.
- These functions also work with the Analytica Cloud Player. For details see Spreadsheets in ACP. When opening a spreadsheet from ACP, it can prompt the user to upload a spreadsheet to ACP. Similarly, when closing a spreadsheet, it can prompt the user to download a spreadsheet with the results.
- Another way to link cells or ranges in Excel with Analytica variables is to use OLE linking. This supports "live" update, so that changes to the spreadsheet propagate automatically to the Analytica model and vice versa.
- You may also access Excel from Analytica using COM Integration (Microsoft Component Object Model), a widely used method for communicating between Windows applications. Analytica's COM functions let you access just about all features of Excel and other Microsoft Windows applications. For examples, see COM and Excel examples.
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