Crystal Ball is the easiest way to perform Monte Carlo simulations in your own spreadsheets. Crystal Ball automatically calculates thousands of different "what if" cases, saving the inputs and results of each calculation as individual scenarios. Analysis of these scenarios reveals to you the range of possible outcomes, their probability of occurring, which input has the most effect on your model and where you should focus your efforts.
Crystal Ball is for strategic planners, financial analysts, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, CPAs, marketing managers, venture capitalists, consultants, Six Sigma professionals, and anyone else who uses spreadsheets to forecast uncertain results. Crystal Ball is taught in the top US business schools and in universities and technical institutions throughout the world
With Crystal Ball you can:
**Add scalable methods for collaborating
**Get your work done faster. Work as a team sharing standardized uncertainty distributions with publish and subscribe features.
**Communicate and persuade **
Share your findings. Graphs, charts and reports let you vividly present and communicate the results of your analysis.
Get a credible picture of risk
The future holds uncertainty and risk and so should your models. Get the information you need from detailed statistics to summarized reports, to understand where to focus your efforts next.
**Adding Probability to Risk Calculations **
****What is the likelihood of reaching a particular goal? What are the critical factors affecting risk? The answer to these and other common "what-if" scenarios can be determined by assigning probability to unknown variables. Excel can't handle the complexity of probability analysis, so you need a better tool: Crystal Ball.
Crystal Ball automates the cumbersome "what-if" process using Monte Carlo simulation, by applying a range of values or a probability distribution to each uncertain variable.
The program generates random values from within the defined probability ranges, and then recalculates the model literally hundreds or thousands of times, storing the results of each "what-if" scenario. This timesaving process alleviates having to manually enter different scenarios over and over again.
Whats New?
This release brings about some substantial changes in Crystal Ball! Here are just a selection of features:
Complete Update of Optquest
A new Wizard for setting up optimizations, full integration with Excel and Crystal Ball, including the ability to control optimizations through Crystal Ball’s control panel,an updated version of OptQuest’s world-class global optimization engine, and much more.
OptQuest Developer's Kit
Now includes an API for programming optimizations in addition to the existing kits of Crystal Ball and CB Predictor.
**Updated Distribution Fitting: **Distribution fitting now includes discrete as well as continuous distributions and certain parameters can be locked for increased accuracy. When fitting to continuous distributions, P-Value calculations for Anderson-Darling and Kolmogorov-Smirnov have been added.
**New Data Analysis Tool **
This tool helps you import data directly into Crystal Ball forecasts, one for each data series. Then, you can analyze the data using any of Crystal Ball’s charting, reporting, and data extraction features.
Advanced Features
The lognormal distribution now has a new location parameter to help you model shifted lognormal distributions. This three-parameter distribution is available for setting up assumptions and for fitting to datasets. You can also lock the values of certain parameters of selected distributions while fitting data to those distributions.
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