In a meeting today, Paul Sanford suggested that it would be nice if Analytica would show the indexes of a variable when you hover over its node.  "I know how I can do that right now," I volunteered. I thought I'd share this with other Analytica users here. The help balloon with my modification shows the indexes on the last line. The indexes come from the computed result, so it only shows them if the result is already computed.  If the result has already been computed and is scalar, then it shows the value, allowing you to hover over nodes and see their scalar values (text or numbers) quickly. To make it easy, I've placed this in a library file, Show-Indexes-In-Help-Balloons.ana. If you want this, all you have to do is add this library to your model (use Add Module... or Add Library... on the File menu, embed). How does it do it? The code in Analytica that decides what should appear in a help balloon is actually implemented as an Analytica expression, and it resides in … [Read more...]

I saw a graph today that I thought was pretty cool and thought I'd share it here.  In his Analytica model, Andrew DeBenedictis of E3 created a depiction energy usage percentiles by time of day in each month.  I think a plausible name for this type of plot would be a Percentile Contour plot. Andrew tells me he got the idea from the Contour/Regions Charts page that I had written many years ago on the Analytica Wiki, which shows how to create plots like these: Nevertheless, I particularly liked the use of gray-scale to show the percentile (amount of activity), the customized scaling of percentiles, and layout of Andrew's graph.  So, how do you put a percentile contour graph like this together?  I thought I'd try it here. First, of course, I need some data, such as Energy_usage, indexed by Hour of day and Month, and for that I need the Hour and Month indexes: Index Hour := 1..24 Index Month := 1..12 Variable Energy_usage := Table(Hour,Month) I … [Read more...]