🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1992Oct12.163650.5776@gw.wmich.edu> scott@gw.wmich.edu writes:

>Does anyone have any info about two Lotus 1-2-3 add on programs
>named @RISK and FORECALC.  Both are for business forecasting.
>How do the products compare, and is one better than the other?

>Julie Scott
>Western Michigan University
>scott@gw.wmich.edu


I've never used ForeCalc, but I've used @Risk for 5 years (on and off)
to do environmental modeling,  Here is what it does, in a nutshell:

Say you have a spreadsheet that makes financial projections over a ten year
period, and in your opinion, one of the critical factors is what the
interest rates will be over the ten years. Instead of a what-if analysis,
@Risk  allows you to express the uncertainty in interest rates as a 
probabilty distribution e.g., a normal distribution with a mean of 9
and a standard deviation of 2.  With @Risk, this is done with one of
about 40 add-in @functions it provides. Instead of a cell for the
interest rate having a fixed value, you replace it with a function
such as @normal(9,2).  Everytime the sheet is recalculated, a new number
will be randomly drawn from the distribution. Thats the first part
of what @Risk does.  The other part is doing all the recalculations
for you.  After adding uncertainty to the model in however many cells
you want, you pop a menu and specify what output cells (profit or
whatever) you want it to track, and how many iterations you want it
to perform.  It will then do all the recalculations, storing your
output each time. Up to 1000 output cells can be tracked, and up
to 33,000 iterations can be performed.  When it finishes all the
iterations, it will analyze all the outputs and summarize the
results both in tables and in graphics.  It will compute mean,range,
min,max, s.d., percentiles, etc. and graph them as well.  Graphs
can be edited and overlayed before printing.

You also have the choice of monte carlo or latin hypercube
sampling, and can specify correlated sampling of variables.

Its really quite a powerful package.  Versions are available for
123 versions 2.xx and 3.1, as well as excel for the PC and the Mac.
I believe the current price is around $400.  If you would like, I 
could mail you the latest newsletter I got from the company that
makes it (their name slips my mind right now).  They also will mail you
a demo disk for free. Send me email if you would like the
newsletter or their address.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Larson     blarson@uiuc.edu
Illinois State Water Survey
Office of Surface Water Resources and Systems Analysis


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