What's new in Analytica 6.6?

This page lists new features in release 6.6 (the current release) of Analytica (including ACP and ADE) since the previous Analytica 6.5 release.

Analytica normally prompts you to download and install the new release the next time you run it. If not, you can download it from Renew, upgrade or download.

Highlights of 6.6

• Assista, the Analytica AI Assistant, is faster and more reponsive.
• The Keelin (or Metalog) distribution is now the preferred method to define any continuous distribution, because it now avoids the occasional infeasibility problem that previously bedeviled it.
• You can select All in Checkboxes for parametric analysis and in Multichoice.
• You can use html to set text styles in text nodes, including bold, italic, underline, bold, colors, bullets, and more in desktop Analytica. Even more html tags work in ACP.
• Sum(x, All) sums over All indexes of x. Similar for Min, Max, Product, and more.
• The new OAuth2Authorize function lets you access web services, such as Google docs, sheets, Salesforce, etc to read or write data.
• You can specify a Fill origin for graphs to let you show colored bands around the center line -- e.g. for probability bands over time.

Assista

• The chat UI is faster. Responses start streaming sooner.
• You can use the Enter key (or Ctrl+Alt) to submit responses without having to click to submit button. The Return key adds a new line (the behavior elsewhere in Analytica). If you have the Use Return to enter data preference set, then the Return key will submit responses and the Enter key adds a new line.

Keelin Metalog distribution 2.0

Introducing the always feasible, infinitely flexible distribution!

The Keelin (MetaLog) distribution has become popular due to its ability to closely match the shapes of all the standard continuous distributions as well as offering enormous flexibility in matching amost any shape. But up until now it has been plagued by finding some parameter combinations infleasible, so it would sometimes fail t to find a valid distribution to fit.

Analytica 6.6 fixes this problem with the MetaLog 2.0 distribution. It includes many new results from

• Manel Baucells, Lonnie Chrisman, Thomas W. Keelin and Stephen Xu (2025), "On the properties of the Metalog distribution" (preprint), forthcoming.

New features include:

• The resulting Keelin (MetaLog) distributions are always feasible.
• There are closed-form analytic expressions for all central and standardized moments (see KeelinPropertyFromA#Basic_statistics_and_moments).
• There is a closed-form analytic expression for partial expectation (see KeelinPropertyFromA#Partial_expectation). This makes the Keelin distribution especially convenient for many problems that use piecewise-linear transformations of an uncertain quantity.
• It uses the superior basis order of the MetaLog 2.0.
• You can also specify the desired «mean», in addition to «values» (data points).
• New set of functions with names of the form <x>KeelinFromA(...)use the «a» coefficient vector from KeelinCoefficients:
  • KeelinFromA(...) -- analog to Keelin(...)
  • DensKeelinFromA(...) -- analog to DensKeelin(...)
  • CumKeelinFromA(...) -- analog to CumKeelin(...)
  • CumKeelinInvFromA(...) -- analog to CumKeelinInv(...)
  • KeelinPropertyFromA(...) -- new to Analytica 6.6

  When using the Keelin distribution, you can either use a quantile parameterization or an «a»-vector parameterization. These new functions make it clearer that you are using the «a»-vector parameterization, instead of using the original (analogous) functions with a special flag.

• A new option uses a direct method for bounded support as an alternative to the previous transform-method for bounded support.

Diagrams and controls

• Checkbox now has an "include ALL" option, enabling Parametric analysis even with a checkbox.
• Multichoice controls include a new option at the top to select all, select none or select first, depending on the context. These are more obvious to the user than using the Ctrl+A key.
• A text node can display several new html formatting options, including changes to text color, bullets and numbered lists.
• A new node visibility option lets you hide a node while Analytica is computing.

Expression language

• There is a new separate Boolean data type. To preserve backward compatibility, the values continue to display as 0 or 1, but the Number format dialog provides an option to display values with the boolean data type as True or False to distinguish them from 0 and 1.
• You can now find the maximum over all indexes of X using

  Max(X, All)

  as a shortcut for

  Max( X, ...IndexesOf(X) )

  which uses Repeated parameter forwarding. The All keyword works for these array-reducing functions, Sum, Min, BitAnd, BitOr and BitXOr.

• If you write your own function, and want it to accept the keyword All for a repeated index parameter, you can include a new OrAll function parameter qualifier.
• When passing a Local function (aka lambda function) as a parameter to a function call, you no longer have to include a function name (which wasn't used anyway).
• You can use '.. operator (Repeated parameter forwarding) on literal lists to "splat" lists (or 1-D arrays) together into the list. Example:

  Local s1 := 'c'..'f', s2 := 'h'..'k' Do [ 'a', 'b', ...s1, 'g', ...s2, 'l' ]

  → ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l']

Built-in functions

• OAuth2Authorize: A new function to log into web services such as Google docs, sheets, Salesforce, etc., which makes it much easier for Analytica models to access (read from or write to) web applications that require authentication.
• TypeOf(x, shallow: True) now returns "Image" when x is an image.
• When x is an image, f"{x:H}" returns the long hex string that appears in a Pict attribute in a model file (but without the parens around it that appear in the model file).
• ReadTextFile returns the file encoding as its fourth return value.
• RunConsoleProcess is able to launch several applications that it previous could not, including PowerShell.
• New syntactic extensions added to the arrow operator, namely x→[n] and x→[m..n] for Text values and In-memory binary data terms.

File saving and loading

• Add Library... defaults to Link to filed module or library for almost all the standard libraries, which is the preferred way to add libraries to your model. (Except it still defaults to Embed a copy for the ACP Style Library since that library acts more module-like and changes its internal state).
• You can now set the Att_Dirties attribute (to 0) for your own user Variables. When set to 0, a change to the Definition doesn't dirty the Library or module that contains the Variable.

Example models and libraries

• A new example model included: "Engineering / Generator availability.ana"
• An able to handle file paths > 256 characters in most cases. Actually taking advantage of this requires you to have long paths enabled in Windows, e.g., by setting the registry setting

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem :: LongPathsEnabled = 1

  or by using the \\unc\.... syntax for file paths. However, long file paths are not supported by Microsoft One drive or by Microsoft office, including Excel, so you cannot use long paths for files within a One drive folder or when opening a spreadsheet file.

• Several of the diagram themes in the Themes Library were renamed.

Graphing

• For Filled-area charts, in Graph set up you can now set the Fill type to "From origin"., and then select the Fill origin in the graph. A common use is in probability bands plot to select .Probability=0.5 as the fill origin, to produce a plot like this:

  

  You could previously do this by placing the Plot solid prob bands function in the OnGraphDraw attribute, but the new feature is much easier to configure, with just a few clicks in the Graph setup dialog.

• Graph Setup / Text / Adapt displayed font sizes to graph height now uses the current height of the graph window you were viewing as the reference height, so that the font sizes you select in the graph setup dialog will be correct when the graph is at that height. Font sizes automatically adjust when you change the graph window size. Previously the reference height was fixed at the default result window height (a graph of 241 pixels tall), which tended to make the fonts way too large for normal window heights. We now recommend using this setting by default so that text on graphs is easily legible at various sizes.

Other GUI

• There are a few new options on the Windows menu:
  • Bring next window to front
  • Bring previous window to front
  • Typescript console to show the Typescript window. (Still also available with ctrl+'.)

Licensing

• ParseJSON and MakeJSON no longer require Analytica Enterprise.