The information in this survey is excerpted from responses to a 1-page questionnaire sent to more than 25 vendors in December 1996. The survey is not comprehensive. It reflects information received by the posted deadline. The information was collected and compiled by OR/MS Today.

The listings are limited to software products that fit the parameters of the survey. The comments were provided by the vendors.

Due to size limitations the online version of the survey is an abridgement of the printed version that included 24 information fields. The complete survey appeared in the February 1997 issue of OR/MS Today. To order a copy of this issue, contact our Customer Service Department at 770-431-0867 ext. 201 or send e-mail to: csr@lionhrtpub.com.

Please open your browser window to its maximum width for better viewing.

If you know of a spreadsheet add-in package that is not in this survey, please contact Jaime Tanner at (770) 431-0867, ext. 215 or e-mail them to jtanner@lionhrtpub.com. They will be included in an online version.

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Key to abbreviated column heads:

Type of Product:

SIM. = SIMULATION

OPT. = OPTIMIZATION

FOR. = FORECASTING

DEC. = DECISION ANALYSIS

FIN. = FINANCIAL ENGINEERING

LNK = LINKS to ANALYTIC ENGINES

Spread-sheets:

EXC. = EXCEL

LOT. = LOTUS

QP = QUATTRO PRO

Limitations:

Lim. COM. = COMMERCIAL

Lim. EDU. = EDUCATION

Price:

COM. = COMMERCIAL

EDU. = EDUCATIONAL

NOTE: Y indicates a positive response, N indicates either a negative response or no response

Product/ Publisher/ Description

Type of Product

Spread-sheets

Limitations

Price

SIM

OPT

FOR

DEC

FIN

LNK

EXC

LOT

QP

Lim. COM.

Lim. EDU.

COM.

EDU.

@EQUITY® Financial Engineering Associates Option pricing and risk management functions for equity-based derivatives. @Equity properly handles discrete dividend payments.

N

N

N

N

Y

N

Y

N

N

N

N

N

N

@Exotics XL Montgomery Investment Technology Inc. Pricing and analysis of second-generation "exotic" options, such as average, barrier, lookback and spread options.

N

N

N

N

Y

Y

Y

Y

N

N

Limited time usage

$999

call

@GLOBAL® Financial Engineering Associates Exotic option and derivative pricing functions for options on global commodities, currencies and energy products.

N

N

N

N

Y

N

Y

N

N

N

N

N

N

@INTEREST Financial Engineering Associates Option and security pricing functions for options on interest-rate based derivatives and assets.

N

N

N

N

Y

N

Y

N

N

N

N

N

N

@nalyst Tech Hackers Inc. @nalyst provides sophisticated analytics functions for bonds, options, mbs, business dates and amortization. Also available as c-subroutine libraries.

N

N

Y

N

Y

Y

Y

N

N

Based on systems resources

A special program is available

$295- $2,500

N

@Options XL Montgomery Investment Technology Inc. A series of models for pricing options on equities, indices, futures and other securities. Models include Black-Scholes, Binomial, Whaley, Garman-Kohlhagan, etc.

N

N

N

N

Y

Y

Y

Y

N

500 node levels of binomial tree

Limited time usage

$399- $2,000

call

@Risk Palisade Corporation @Risk is the Risk Analysis add-in for Excel and Lotus 1-2-3. @Risk adds the power of Monte Carlo simulation to any spreadsheet model. Generates graphs and detailed statistical reports

Y

N

N

N

N

N

Y

Y

N

Iterations: memory dep.; correlation: spreadsheet dep.

Same as commercial

$395

call

AXA Sunset Software Tech. AXA solves linear and integer linear programming models. The AXA engine is a dynamic link library available for use by other programming languages like Visual Basic, C++ and Fortran.

N

Y

N

N

N

N

Y

N

N

Model size limited by available memory

500 rows by 1,000 columns

call

call

BestFit Palisade Corporation BestFit® is distribution fitting solution for Windows. BestFit finds the statistical distribution that best fits any data set up to 30,000 points. Results can be used in @Risk.

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

Up to 30,000 data points or pairs

Same as commercial

$299

call

Crystal Ball Decisioneering Crystal Ball is a leading Monte Carlo simulation add-in for Excel and Lotus 1-2 that performs forecasting and risk analysis for spreadsheet-based modeling.

Y

N

N

Y

N

N

Y

Y

N

Unlimited iterations

Same as commercial

$395

$129

DataImport® Spalding Software DataImport pulls data from even complex multi-level reports into the native formats of Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro Pro, Access, etc. The user selects the specific data, needed by defining inclusion/exclusion criteria.

N

N

N

N

N

N

Y

Y

Y

Maximum of 2,048 characters per line

Same as commercial

$189

$189

DA.XLA Cliff Ragsdale DA.XLA performs discriminant analysis based on the minimum Mahalanobis distance measure.

N

N

N

N

N

N

Y

N

N

Ten groups, 1,000 observations

Three groups, 100 observations

call

call

DPL Applied Decision Analysis DPL is a complete decision analysis package that links influence diagrams decision trees to spreadsheet models. Extensive graphical outputs include decision policies, risk profiles and sensitivity analysis.

N

N

N

Y

N

N

Y

Y

N

No hard wired constraints

Speed reduced to limit models to around 2k endpoints

$495- $995

$50- $100

Evolver Palisade Corporation Evolver™ uses innovative genetic algorithm (GA) technology to quickly solve complex optimization problems in virtually any type of problem that can be modeled in an Excel spreadsheet.

N

Y

N

N

N

N

Y

N

N

All components in optimization must be on single Excel sheet.

Same as commercial

$ 349

call

Exotic Options Simulator Montgomery Investment Technology Inc. Pricing of exotic, path dependent options using Monte Carlo simulations techniques. Prices average, barrier and lookback exotics and plain vanilla options.

Y

N

N

N

Y

Y

Y

N

N

Requires @Risk 3.5 for Excel.

Same as commercial

$795- $995

call

Exotics @nalyst Tech Hackers Inc. Exotics @nalyst is available in three modules: Asian/Lookback; Binary/Barrier and Basket/Chooser. Industry-accepted models are used for pricing, gap, best-of-two securities and exchange.

Y

N

N

N

Y

Y

Y

N

N

Based on systems resources

A special program is available; contact company

$995- $3,700

N

Fin Tools Montgomery Investment Technology Inc. A suite of spread sheet add-ins and development tools for options analysis and simulation; bond analysis and pricing; and commodity price forecasting, especially electricity.

Y

N

Y

N

Y

Y

Y

Y

N

N

Limited time licensing

call

call

Insight Duxbury Press A package of easy-to-use analytical tools designed for teaching and quick back of the spreadsheet modeling. Includes examples that display fundamental analytical concepts.

Y

Y

Y

Y

N

N

Y

N

N

M.C. Simulation: 5,000 iterations, 5 output cells; Trees: Ltd. by spreadsheet size

N

$50

$25

Inventory Analysis User Solutions, Inc. Demand forecasting in any spreadsheet. Features ABC, "best-fit", seasonal indices, etc.

N

N

Y

N

N

N

Y

Y

Y

1,000 Part Numbers

None

$149

$99

Large Scale LP Solver for Excel Frontline Systems Inc. Upgrade to standard, premium and Quadratic solvers for Excel. Adds sparse Simplex method with sophisticated matrix factorization and updating for large-scale LP problems. Version planned for Lotus 1-2-3 '97.

N

Y

N

N

N

N

Y

Y

N

16,000 decision variables in Excel '97

N

$1,495

N

Operations Manager User Solutions, Inc. Operations Manager 35 decision support templates for: EOQ, forecasting, QC, planning, queueing and inventory.

N

N

N

Y

N

N

Y

Y

Y

-

None

$149

$99

Outlook™ Financial Engineering Associates Value-at-Risk and VaRdelta calculation functions and templates.

N

N

N

N

Y

N

Y

N

N

N

N

N

N

Precision Tree Palisade Corporation Precision Tree™ is the decision analysis link to Excel. Use influence diagrams to see the relationships between components of a problem then add decision trees to see the sequence of events.

N

N

N

Y

N

N

Y

N

N

N

N

$495- $795

call

Premium Quadratic Solver for Excel Frontline Systems Inc. Fully compatible upgrade to Excel's standard solver. Offers high performance quadratic programming method, plus higher capability, faster LP, MIP, NLP methods. Version planned for Lotus 1-2-3 '97

N

Y

N

N

N

N

Y

Y

N

800 decision variables LP/QP/MIP; 400 variables, 200 constraints for NLP

Same as commercial

$695

$50

Premium Solver for Excel Frontline Systems Inc. Upgrade to Excel's standard solver, with greater capacity and speed. Fully compatible with Excel Solver's models. Visual basic programming interface and all Excel functions. Version planned for Lotus 1-2-3 '97.

N

Y

N

N

N

N

Y

Y

N

800 decision variables LP/QP/MIP; 400 variables, 200 constraints for NLP

N

$495

$50

Resource Manager for Excel User Solutions, Inc. Resource Manager for Excel is designed to adapt to any operation. Key features include: manage labor, materials, machines, MRP, inventory, FCS, costed BOM's and priority scheduling.

N

N

N

N

N

N

Y

N

N

Excel Database

None

$1,850

$495

RISKview Palisade Corporation RISKview™ is the distribution viewing companion to @RISK, @Risk for Project, @RISK for TopRank or BestFit. It is a powerful tool for viewing, assessing and creating probability distributions.

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

N

$79- $149

call

SmartForecasts for Windows Smart Software Inc. Smart Software Inc. PC-based sales and demand forecasting for Windows '95/NT. Automatic forecasting system used to project sales and product demand and reduce inventory multiple windows display; full cut, copy and paste capabilities.

N

N

Y

N

N

N

Y

Y

Y

N

N

$895

$449

SPAY™ Financial Engineering Associates Option pricing and risk management functions for options on baskets and basket averages.

N

N

N

N

Y

N

Y

N

N

Up to 12 underlying assets

N

N

N

Spreadsheet QC User Solutions, Inc. Spreadsheet QC 15 models that make SPC/SQC achievable for everyone. Charts and analysis include Pareto, histogram, scatter, control (Xbar, R, CU, P), binomial, Poisson and regression.

N

N

N

N

N

N

Y

Y

Y

-

-

$149

$99

Spreadsheet Scheduler User Solutions, Inc. Spreadsheet Scheduler contains 14 simple templates for a variety of common scheduling applications such as project management, Gantt charts, job scheduling and calendar generation.

N

N

N

N

N

N

Y

Y

Y

-

-

$199

$99

SWING™ Financial Engineering Associates Functions and templates for pricing and risk management of energy-related swing (load factor) contracts.

N

N

N

N

Y

N

Y

N

N

N

N

N

N

TopRank Palisade Corporation TopRank® is the What-If add-in for Excel and Lotus 1-2-3. TopRank determines which values affects your bottom line the most and ranks them in order of importance.

N

N

N

N

N

N

Y

Y

N

Pro: Unltd.; Stnd.: Ltd. Multi-way analysis, no @Risk function

Same as commercial

$249 -$395

call

Weighted Decision Object InfoHarvest Inc. The WDO is an OLE object that allows the user, using VBA to submit tables of data to a Criterium DecisionPlus Multi-criteria model and obtain decision scores and pass/fail results.

N

N

N

Y

N

N

Y

N

N

Limited to 100 criteria

N

$299

N

What's Best! LINDO Systems Inc. What's Best! solves large-scale linear, nonlinear and integer models in Excel or 1-2-3. It's powerful enough to handle the toughest problems and ideal providing models to managers or clients.

N

Y

N

N

N

N

Y

Y

N

Various capacity versions available from 1,600 variables to unlimited.

Student ver. ltd. to 400 variables, larger capacity versions available at ed. discounts

from $695

from $25

Workcell Planner User Solutions, Inc. Workcell Planner Cell capacity planning for machine shops and fabricators. Allows easy "what-if" analysis of interaction of setup times, lot sizes, efficiency, yields and work practices.

N

Y

N

N

N

N

Y

N

N

-

-

$79

-

Go to the article related to this survey: "Weighing the Pros and Cons of Decision Technology in Spreadsheets"



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