All our books except VBA for Modelers include textbook version of Lumivero's DecisionTools suite. This suite includes @RISK, StatTools, PrecisionTree, TopRank, NeuralTools, and Evolver. Some basic information about this textbook version (and the DecisionTools software in general) is listed here. For more information, visit https://lumivero.com/.
Learning the software: With any of the add-ins such as StatTools open, select the “Welcome to xxx” item from the Help dropdown list. There you will see a “Getting Started” or “Quick Start” link.
In addition, each of the add-ins, especially @RISK, has plenty of example models characterized by industry/type.
Limitations of textbook edition: Lumivero provides various academic versions of their software. If you go to https://palisade.lumivero.com/academic-offerings/, you will see it is possible to purchase, at a greatly reduced price, a “student version.” The version that comes with our books is different from this. It is FREE to all students who buy a new copy of our books, but it has the following limitations (which might change over time):
@RISK models are limited to 4 worksheets, each with 300 rows by 100 columns in a single Excel workbook. In addition, you can have no more than 100 @RISK input functions in your model. Any model that exceeds these limitations cannot be simulated.
You may run at most 1000 iterations of unattended @RISK simulations. You can run simulations with a larger number of iterations, but you will need to click "OK" to a dialog every 1000 iterations.
The @RISK Library is not available in textbook versions.
@RISK distribution fitting data sets are limited to 250 observations.
RISKOptimizer will not run optimizations with more than 10 adjustable cells.
(Based on one instructor’s experience who purposely introduced small macros into his students’ files) If the file is an .xlsm file, containing macros, attempting to run an @RISK simulation will produce a meaningless error message. Here is Palisade’s response to this issue: If the user doesn’t grant their own macro sufficient permissions to run you can get this error. They likely need to add the file to a trusted location, or mark the publisher as a trusted publisher, or something similar.
NeuralTools models are limited to 1000 cells per variable. Analyses cannot be performed on any models that exceed these limitations.
PrecisionTree models are restricted to 500 nodes in a decision tree. Influence diagrams are limited to 500 nodes of the equivalent underlying decision tree.
TopRank models are limited to 4 worksheets, each with 300 rows by 100 columns in a single Excel workbook. In addition, you must have at most 100 TopRank input functions in your model. Any model that exceeds these limitations cannot be analyzed.
Customers of Palisade software: If you are wondering whether your school or company is alone in the use of the Palisade software, here is some very convincing evidence to the contrary: https://palisade.lumivero.com/academic-offerings/ and https://lumivero.com/resources/case-studies/. In addition, if you are a student and are convinced of the worth of the Palisade software, but you are worried that the company you will soon join won’t have it, maybe you can do what some of our IU students have done: convince your company that it should purchase the software. The lists in these two links should help you “sell” it!