Oracle Crystal Ball

Brilliant Excel add-on for understanding the impact of risk and uncertainty

주석: I found Crystal Ball during an executive course at Wharton over 8 years ago. I have continued to use the tool ever since.

장점:

The tool allows the user to work on their projects within Excel (the gold standard) and utilize the Oracle Crystal Ball tools without changing the platform. Although the UI is pretty basic, it delivers exactly what is needed to perform quick Monte Carlo simulations and sensitivity analysis.

단점:

The Excel add-on can be a little problematic from time to time but you can easily find answers on the web to back on track. The user interface is dated and the charts are basic.

Remarkably powerful analysis tool set, many Monte carlo applications

주석: If you need something that falls under this application set, this is arguably the best tool on offer.

장점:

The ability to perform powerful analysis and intuitive Monte carlo simulations using the existing Excel infrastructure is exceptional. A solid GUI that allows for rapid changes and adjustments, that once learned allows for near-real time adjustments and rapid analysis of numerous data sets, with excellent visualization of aggregated outputs.

단점:

Learning curve is steep at the very initial point, but there is excellent documentation from both Oracle and third party sources. Ultimately, the only real capability missing would be to incorporate this capability into non-Microsoft spreadsheet tools - i.e. GoogleSheets. The majority of the limitations on ease of use for middleware of this type are really inherited constraints coming from the platform it has to run on, in this case Excel.

Monte Carlo Simulation Right at Your Fingertips with Excel

주석: Once a model is created (generally the hard part), Crystal Ball enhances the strength and predictive power of the model by incorporating variation and statistics to give a more realistic and probably result. Crystal ball is easy to use and incorporate into your model

장점:

Oracle Crystal Ball is a simple software application, used with Microsoft Excel to simulate monte carlo runs with your predictive models. It is simple to use as a macro add-on to your model created on Microsoft Excel. One would need to define the inputs, outputs and the distributions. Once those are defined, the software will run the statistics and provide bar charts of the resulting outputs, taking into account the variations in the model.

단점:

There are some quirks with the software such as: 1. If you have multiple models open, the run button will run all models opened, which could add significant amount of time if complex models are opened. 2. If Microsoft Excel is already opened, it will need to be closed to open Excel with Crystal Ball application.

Oracle Crystal Ball Review

주석: Very solid software that provides good input for project teams.

장점:

It provides a means to do cost & schedule risk analysis for projects. It has a wide range of inputs/functionality that make it adaptable.

단점:

The more advanced parts of the software required a good deal of learning.

Tool which helps you to quickly run simulations

주석: It has helped to deal with big data and run simulations on them which are not painful.

장점:

In my job I deal with big data which has data from different communities. I use Oracle crystal ball to run simulations to understand correlations, probabilities and deviations. I have found the tool easy to use and quick to run with minimal effort and training. I would recommend this to anyone.

단점:

The different number of distributions are lacking and its probably not suitable to run some of the complex simulations.

Awesome tool for running simulations!!!

주석: Its been great experience and I would recommend this to anyone running simulation models.

장점:

I have been using for the past 6 months to run simulations with the add-in in excel. I have found it easy to use and very informative in terms of the quality of the output and the number of uses I can put it to.

단점:

I think it probably can be made more user friendly so that somebody who is not proficient in it can also work on it.

Easy to use, Extremely Useful

장점:

Crystal Ball makes Monte Carlo Simulation very easy. It is impressively easy to learn and is capable of advanced finance/forecasting techniques.

단점:

The biggest challenge with Crystal Ball is understanding its inner workings before applying it to problem sets. It is crucial to understand the implications of how the software performs its calculations before use.