Customer Reviews

The Art of Modeling with Spreadsheets: Management Science, Spreadsheet Engineering, and Modeling Craft

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

A once useful entree to the spreadsheet modeling literature, this book is now obsolete. The version listed here is copyrighted 2004 but comes with a CD containing release 2000.2 of Crystal Ball which Decisioneering is no longer event supporting. This old version of the software as well as the Advanced Solver add-in has compatibility problems with Windows XP -not to mention Vista, and Wiley does not stand behind the product. Once I loaded the advanced solver, the solver feature no longer produced optimal solutions.

Extremely disappointing to buy a $90 textbook with obsolete software that causes Excel to malfunction and cannot be updated. Impossible to consider this as a class text book. If the publishers will not keep the product current it should be withdrawn from the market, and reputable vendors should at least WARN buyers, if they choose to continue to market and sell this once useful product.

Powell takes the interesting approach of showing how to model a solution to a problem, and using a spreadsheet as the engine within which to embed the solution. Who would have thought in the 70s, when the first computer spreadsheets arose, that one day they could be applied to this?

Much of the book revolves around the issues of modelling. How to extract this from a problem. Here, this is as in many other texts. But we then see how a spreadsheet can be built up, with the equations that relate a group of input cells to write a value in an output cell, being those that model the solution.

To a computer programmer, this use of a spreadsheet might seem a little confining. After all, shouldn't you write code in some general purpose language like C++ or Java, to do this? But the number of programmers who can do this well is fairly small. Whereas spreadsheets have a far broader audience, even in terms of who is able to program them. That is the audience Powell writes for.

I did not care about the software, I use Riskamp (very decently priced software), so I cant judge it by that. I think it is wrong to judge the book by the software anyways but whatever. This book is GREAT and that is from a Project modeler. The authors break it into parts and make it interesting reading. I always continue reading on the areas of my work and I have 20 years experience but that is how you keep fresh. As an independent consultant you dont have a lot of co-workers you can bounce new ideas off so you need to continue to read and learn to obtain new ideas. That is what made this country great by the way, no one accepting the status quo - God I hope we can get back to that...

Well if you are going into the field or are a Modeler than this book will be well worth the time to read.

I am very impressed with this book.Overall the book is truly comprehensive and explains the topics using easy examples. These examples can be further explored using EXCEL. I think it will be helpful for the people first learning the lecture of decision analysis.