This is a maintenance release which fixes a bug in EasyFit Professional causing Excel to crash under certain conditions. All users of EasyFit 4.x experiencing this problem can upgrade to EasyFit 4.3 by uninstalling the old version and installing the new one.
Starting from version 4.2, EasyFit is available in two editions: Standard and Professional. Both editions include the stand-alone application allowing to fit probability distributions to data, view distribution graphs and properties, perform probability calculations, and make projections/estimates. On top of that, the Professional edition includes the EasyFitXL add-in enabling you to use most of these features right in Excel (compare the editions).
The Standard and Professional editions are delivered as a single download: the installation package will ask you which edition of EasyFit to install. If you install the Professional edition, EasyFitXL will be automatically configured to work with your copy of Excel.
We offer a range of licenses, including the Perpetual and Annual licenses, for both product editions. Academic users can purchase the Professional edition at a discounted price.
If you purchased EasyFit 4.0 or 4.1, and would like to upgrade, you should choose “EasyFit Professional” during the installation process.
Click here to watch the quick Flash demo showing how to fit probability distributions using EasyFit and apply the best fitting distribution to perform specific calculations - for instance, make estimates using the quantile function, and calculate probabilities.
The data set used in this demo consists of maximum daily wind gust speeds recorded at Station TPLM2 located in the Atlantic Ocean during 2005-2007. This station is owned and maintained by the National Data Buoy Center, and measures wind speed, air temperature, sea temperature, and other data used for weather forecasting.
NOAA defines a wind gust as “a sudden, brief increase in speed of the wind” which usually lasts for less than 20 seconds. The relatively rare but very high wind gusts cause the most damage, that is why they are of more interest than the average daily wind speeds. In essence, the wind gusts are extreme events - no wonder the Generalized Extreme Value distribution perfectly fits the data:
(the x axis units are m/s)
The Student License is a new, affordable license that can be purchased and used by students of educational institutions for homework, coursework, and other non-commercial purposes. This license expires in 12 months, starting from the purchase date.
On the other hand, if you need to use EasyFit for more than one year - for example, for PhD research, then the Academic License would be a more cost-effective solution for you, since it doesn’t expire and can be used for as long as necessary. We have been offering the Academic License for almost 2 years now, and during that time, we have received a lot of useful feedback from our customers. We appreciate any kind of feedback, both positive and negative, so if you have something to say about EasyFit, or would like to share how you are using it exactly, feel free to let us know.
We are happy to announce that EasyFit is now available on a subscription basis, in addition to the traditional perpetual software licensing. The subscription licensing program enables you to legally use the full version of EasyFit for a limited period of time without the need for a large upfront investment. At the same time, you get access to the latest versions of the product and technical support.
Specifically, the Annual Subscription License allows you to use EasyFit for one year at a fraction of the Perpetual License price. We are also considering to offer additional shorter-term subscriptions such as semi-annual and quarterly licenses - please let us know if you are interested.
Why Subscription Software?
Outside the software world, the idea of charging customers per use or per time period is nothing new - consider your electricity or phone bills - because companies and individual users usually get paid monthly, they also prefer to spend monthly. Software vendors don’t want to get left behind and strive to offer “pay per use” and similar flexible pricing models. This approach has in fact been mastered by numerous online subscription sites that usually charge you per month.
The situation with desktop software is a bit different here: the customers are prepared to pay a relatively large upfront fee and optional annual maintenance fees due to historical reasons. After all, software users actually like to own the products they purchased. However, when it comes to large ticket items, there is a benefit in renting, or subscribing to, software products, which allows you to better manage your costs and save money in certain cases - for example, when you need the software for a short-term project.
There is also a positive side effect of subscription software: for a customer, it drives down the costs of switching to competing products, and thus motivates vendors to work harder on improving their software. Some large companies such as Autodesk already offer their rather expensive products on a yearly subscription basis as a cost-effective alternative to the perpetual licensing, and this is something other vendors should consider doing.
The problem of modeling extreme or rare events arises in many areas where such events can have very negative consequences. Some examples of rare events include extreme floods and snowfalls, high wind speeds, extreme temperatures, large fluctuations in exchange rates, and market crashes. To develop appropriate probabilistic models and assess the risks caused by these events, business analysts and engineers frequently use the extreme value distributions (EVD). read the full article
A new article about generating random numbers in Excel is now available in the Tutorials section. The article describes how the standard Excel worksheet functions and the inverse transform method can used to generate random numbers from various distributions, discusses the drawbacks of this approach, and explains how the EasyFitXL add-in can be used to overcome the limitations of Excel.
Starting 24 December 2007, we offer significant discounts for our distribution fitting software EasyFit. Depending on the license type, you can save up to 25% off the regular product price.
This is a limited time offer, valid until January 5, 2008.
Happy holidays!
The new version of EasyFit introduces a number of features targeted at business users dealing with probability data analysis, modeling, and simulation. For a complete list of new features and fixes in EasyFit 4.0, please click here.
The free 30-day trial version of EasyFit is available for download.
EasyFitXL - EasyFit for Excel
Many businesses use Excel for their data analysis & modeling needs, and even though Excel provides only a basic set of statistical functions, it can be easily extended by installing third party add-ins. An add-in is a piece of software that integrates into Excel and allows you to perform specific tasks which are impossible (or hard, time consuming etc.) to do using Excel alone.
EasyFitXL is a new Excel add-in which ships with EasyFit and allows to use most of the features available in EasyFit right in Excel. With EasyFitXL, you can fit distributions to worksheet data, view distribution graphs, perform probability calculations, and generate random numbers without the need to run EasyFit (the stand-alone application).
The installation process of EasyFitXL is very straightforward: if you have Excel (version 2000 or later) installed on your computer, the EasyFit setup application will automatically install and configure EasyFitXL to properly work with your copy of Excel.
Once EasyFitXL is installed, it can be accessed from the main menu of Excel:
In Excel 2007, it can be found on the Add-Ins page:
Along with the main menu commands, EasyFitXL provides a large number of functions which you can use in Excel worksheets and VBA applications to create advanced models dealing with uncertainty. The worksheet functions are divided into three large categories displayed in the Function Wizard:
The following worksheet and VBA functions are available for more than 40 probability distributions:
These functions can be applied to solve a wide array of problems, ranging from simple probability calculations to Monte Carlo simulation.
A new, fourth version of the distribution fitting application EasyFit is planned to be released later this month (November 2007). We’re currently busy with extensively testing the product and updating the documentation.
The new version will in particular be of great interest to Excel users as, in addition to a stand-alone desktop application, EasyFit will also work as a MS Excel add-in, making it a flexible yet powerful solution for complex probability calculations such as Monte Carlo simulation. Though the desktop application is still a very important part of the product, the advanced Excel integration is something we have got so many requests for.
Some of the new Excel-related features and benefits of EasyFit include:
1) Visual interface for data analysis and simulation: EasyFit integrates into Excel’s main menu, enabling you to easily fit probability distributions to data and generate random numbers without the need to leave the popular spreadsheet application.
2) Worksheet functions: EasyFit makes about 300 new functions available to Excel worksheets, allowing you to perform specific probability calculations and decision making based on the analysis results.
The functions include random number generation, PDF, CDF, Inverse CDF (and more) for all the 40+ probability distributions supported by EasyFit.
3) VBA functions: All the 300 new functions (see above) will also be available to Excel Visual Basic applications, allowing you to use the features of EasyFit in your own VBA programs. You no longer need to remember complex formulas and deal with the lack of support for probability distributions in standard Excel library.
The supported Excel versions are 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2007. The latest version (2007) is worth special mention as, aside from the completely new user interface, it introduces several important features not available in the older versions, specifically the support for larger worksheets and the multi-threaded recalculation. The users of EasyFit will benefit from this new functionality as well - more on this topic next time.
The desktop application (EasyFit) has also been improved: it now provides a new graph type (Q-Q Plot), more flexible graph options, extended export capabilities, P-values calculation, an updated implementation of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness-of-fit test, a new random number generator, and more.
In the meanwhile, if you order the current version of EasyFit this month, you will be able to upgrade to the upcoming new version for free. The free upgrade will also be provided to all the existing customers who purchased EasyFit less than a year ago.
