Spreadsheet Engineering of Crystal Ball Simulation Models

This paper surveys what is known about the creation of spreadsheets, and presents some ideas to increase the productivity and effectiveness of spreadsheet simulations. I discuss spreadsheet errors, and present a spreadsheet engineering framework that supports critical examination of how you create and use your spreadsheet models. I summarize useful design recommendations, and briefly discuss the growing set of tools now available for quality control and debugging. I explore the spreadsheet engineering issues associated with the use of Crystal Ball® assumptions and Crystal Ball functions for modeling probability distributions, and close with some suggestions for more quickly getting key information out of Crystal Ball and into your spreadsheet for further analysis.