Analytica Free Edition

Analytica User GuideUser Interfaces for End UsersAnalytica Free Edition

Model sharing options

When you distribute your model to others, one option is to provide them with your model file, and ensure that they have Analytica installed on their computer. The easiest way is to publish your model to the Analytica Cloud Platform (ACP) and email them an invitation URL to your model. Or you an ask them to install the Analytica Free Edition, which can run any model. If your model uses features special to Analytica Enterprise (e.g. database access or huge arrays) or Analytica Optimizer, they will get a warning, and will need the relevant edition to run the model. When you build a model with the intention of sharing it on ACP, you may want to use special ACP features and the ACP Styles library to make a really nice user interface.

Analytica Free Edition

The Analytica Free edition allows users to browse existing models, change inputs, and evaluate and view results. When the model has more than 101 user objects, or is saved as browse only, users cannot make changes to the model except for changes variables with input nodes.

Big Announcement

Release 6.4 will support 1000 objects, OLE linking and multithreading!

This will allow many models to be developed with the Free edition, but keep in mind it does not enable OpenAI, database access, huge indexes, Monte Carlo runs with more than 32000 iterations or optimization.

To distribute your model to someone who already has Analytica installed, either the Free edition or another edition, you can simply attach the model to an email. When the user clicks on the attachment and selects Run, the model opens in Analytica. You can also place the model on a web server with a hyperlink on web page using HTML such as:

Please view <a href="myModel.ana">my Analytica model</a>.

If you do not have Analytica installed on your computer, please <a href="https://www.lumina.com/products/free101/">download and install Analytica Free Edition</a>first.

When the user who has Analytica installed clicks on the model link, Analytica launches with the model loaded.

When your model is spread across multiple linked modules, you will need to send all these module files to your end-user and have them save them all (usually in the same directory) before launching the main file. Be sure to tell them which model file is the top-level model that they should launch. To avoid the multiple-file complication, a better option is to save a copy of your model in a single file and send or post that single file (the linked-file structure is not preserved when you do this, hence, you send it as a copy). To do this, select File→ Save A Copy In... and check the Save everything in one file by embedding linked modules checkbox.

Spreadsheet functions such as SpreadsheetOpen(), SpreadsheetCell(), etc., and OLE Linking are not available in Analytica Cloud Platform (ACP).

Testing in Free Edition

To experience your model in the Analytica Free edition yourself before handing it off to your users, select Help → Update License..., and select analytica_free from the License ID dropdown. After pressing OK, you’ll need to restart Analytica. Repeat the process to select your other license when you are finished. If you do this often, you may wish to create a Windows desktop shortcut to eliminate the need for the above steps. The shortcut should run the following command line:

Analytica.exe /lic:analytica_free

The Analytica Power Player provides users with the ability to utilize Enterprise-edition features. Although a Power Player is not free, it is less expensive than the license for a full Professional edition. If your users require live access to your ODBC databases, huge arrays, or the ability to save their inputs, then Power Player should be used. Optimizer-enabled Power Player licenses are also available.

Summary

You can use input and output nodes to direct users of your model to relevant input and output variables. These nodes can be arranged into control panels for convenient presentation.

Only variables with an associated input node can be modified by in browse-only mode by users of Analytica Free edition, Power Player or Analytica Cloud Platform.

Analytica Free Edition is free to install, and hence provides way to share your models with others who do not have a licensed edition of Analytica. Power Player adds to this an ability to query databases, evaluate functions that require the Enterprise edition, and compute with huge indexes or sample sizes larger than 32000.

Analytica Free Edition

Contents

Model sharing options