This was the first publicly-available version.
This version was used by about 125 students at Rutgers in the Fall of 2001. Follow this link for the version 0.9 user guide.
This version includes fixes of bugs discovered in Fall 2001, and some enhancements suggested in the journal paper referee reports.
YASAI now attempts to guess how many scenarios you need, and gives you a choice of accepting its guess or specifying a different number; this feature also involved a redesign of the main dialog box.
A triangular distribution generator has been added.
GENTABLE allows its arguments to have different shapes, so long as the total number of cells match.
In version 0.9, output statistics for variables having a different number of observations than the sample size were usually wrong.
In version 0.9, the arguments to GENNORMAL were rounded to integers.
GENTABLE now conforms with the specification and does not require all data to be in columns.
In version 0.9, worksheets with names like "Simulation Output blah", where blah was non-numeric, could crash YASAI.
Run times were reported incorrectly in version 0.9.
When error values are returned, they are now "true" Excel error objects.
Link updating now takes into account that some browsers may rename the add-in file from .XLA to .XLS.
The information in the "about" box has been expanded and updated.
GENTABLE has been rewritten and should be a little faster.
Some redundant argument type checking code has been deleted.
The tab order and tool tips in the main dialog box have been tweaked.
This was a substantial maintenance and feature enhancement release.
Output and Parameter names are now sorted alphabetically on the output report.
YASAI Functions are now accessible from the "Statistics" category of the Excel "Insert Function" dialog box.
The YASAI version, same-seed setting, and random number seed are now included in the output report.
Users may specify a random number seed without the "same seed" box being checked.
A confirmation box now appears if user tries to simulate a sheet whose name begins "Simulation Output".
Simoutput now interprets TRUE as +1, rather than -1. It also returns a value with the same datatype as it is passed.
Added message box preventing YASAI from running without first having an open workbook (previously, selecting YASAI with no open workbook crashed Excel).
Substituted L'Ecuyer's
MRG32K3A random number generator for VBA's
RND(), which is not very sophisticated. The MRG32K3A random number generator function is called
YRandom(). This change should result in more robust simulation results,
although simulations run significantly slower. However, there are some
savings in memory, because a potentially large array that had to be maintained
to work around a RND() seed-setting bug in Excel 97 has been eliminated
(see "bugs fixed" for version 0.8).
A minor maintenance release focused on the issue of link repair. Excel insists on using absolute pathnames in the "links" it uses to locate user-defined functions, which causes no end of trouble.
Link repair is now attempted both on the internal link array and on worksheet formula text. This should reduce the chance that users will have to manually repair text links. Also, if Excel asks whether you want to repair links, it now no longer matters if one answers "yes" or "no".
We have created an experimental auto-installer program to simplify installation. It takes care of deleting old versions of YASAI, and also tries to install in a fixed path that is likely to exist on most systems, "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Library". This change should reduce the likelihood that files moved between different computers will need link repair. The installer may need further refinement, especially in dealing with systems where YASAI has already been installed.
Link repair should now work under Office XP (see "link repair" under "features added"). The link repair strategy version 1.1 employed in Office 97 and 2000 did not work under Office XP. Text-based link-repair is also needed.
A major release with significant new functionality and major bug fixes.
A wide variety of charts can be created from the most recent simulation. This capability was developed several years ago, but needed more debugging.
The install.xls file should make installation easier on many systems. This file replaces the less reliable version 1.15 auto-installer.
We have added a generator for geometric random variables.
Greatly improved handling of situations in which two or more outputs have the same name. Outputs with the same name are now correctly "pooled" into a single set of observations, whose observation count may exceed the originally specified sample size. This change involved restructuring some of the internal data arrays. Previously, having two outputs with the same name could crash YASAI.
Although it has been hard for us to test, we have made changes to make YASAI function better with non-English language versions of Excel. Specifically, YASAI will attempt to insert its menu options into the foreign-language equivalent of the "Tools" menu, for example "Outils" in French Excel.
We have corrected a bug that could result in inaccurate data on the "Simulation Output" sheets.