General presentation
No$, the interSyntax tool, is available as an Excel web complement for Windows distributed by Microsoft AppSource. It is available in a free version to familiarize with its concepts and in a paid version for professional use. A mac distribution on Apple AppStore and a VSTO solution without internet connection are planned.
No$ aims to reduce the full cost of modelling by automating duplications in a technique where the ‘$’ in formulas is useless, hence its name. For this, its user interfaces revisit and complement the «cut-copy-paste-delete» of traditional office automation by an «entity-move-duplicate».
This productivity tool, like all industrialization techniques, drastically increases speed, reliability and quality over the entire modelling cycle. Furthermore, its implementation impacts the performance of the decision-making cycle in the broadest sense: faster decisions, more relevant and generating more consensus.
The decision-makers, gaining more weight through more credible statements which a stronger rationality, get additionally more availability and reactivity in the exercise of their technical and human responsibilities. Globally, the result is a better corporate strategic quality because it enables seizing a larger number of opportunities, more efficiently and with more determination.
Building models!
For the construction of models on spreadsheets, a common technique consists in duplicating blocks of cells containing formulas in order to multiply blocks performing the same functions. For an industrial enterprise, these may be plants of similar structure each with workshops, each comprising a certain number of machines entrusted to several teams; for a bank, these may be modules each corresponding to a particular financing technique with a variable amount of credit lines and over a variable number of years; for an urban planner, blocks of buildings can be considered modelling all roads and main network in a neighbourhood…
Is the “$” needed ?
The ‘$’ technique, while providing obvious gains, raises questions about the time required to establish these references and their reliability in the duplicated blocks.
An additional step on all conventional spreadsheets has been to decorate each reference formula by ‘$’’s, indicating whether their duplication should be relative to the duplicate block or remain invariant. Thus, a cell with the formula ‘=$A$1’ is not modified during duplication, while the cell with the formula ‘=A$1’ is modified to maintain the same column gap with the originally referenced cell and continue to target row 1. This abusively rich technique brings obvious gains to those who, knowing how to plan the construction of their models, carefully place the ‘$’ in each reference of each formula.
Improve performances
However, a value analysis reveals that the ‘$’ solution is used very partially when building models, therefore it is difficult to use and quickly becomes a source of error.
To overcome this disadvantage, No$ offers a systemic approach of formulas belonging to the ranges to be duplicated, these ranges being interpreted together as a single system recorded in a No$ object called “entity”. Each of the ranges in this entity comes from ranges selected from Excel that individually group cells with formulas supposed to perform similar behaviour through duplication. This approach enables to avoid the tricky and time-consuming task of using “$”.
Thus, the creation of a model begins with the design of a “minimal” scenario, aiming to represent generic entities to be duplicated, without requiring any No$ tool at this stage. The second and last step is to ask No$ to duplicate accordingly these entities and achieve the desired ‘developed’ model. The final model is then usable by any Excel user with or without access to No$.
Benefits
With No$, the larger is the model, the higher is the modelling costs reduction. Gains comes from:
- Responsiveness: the tedious activity of writing formulas, which weighs up to 90% of the time of creating a model, could be reduced by an order of magnitude and much more. Model maintenance, on the other hand, is limited to the correction of generic entities or of the duplication sequence, before No$ minimal model duplication.
- Controlling: The developer of a model is only a matter of validating generic entities and the duplication sequence, since automation guarantees the relevance of the model thus generated, especially for references.
- Sharing: The programming of duplication sequences allows relevant managers to easily and quickly create and update scenarios that illustrate the decisions they envision.
- Organization: this tool offers the opportunity to organize model building through actors’ specialization. The task can be divided between designers, focused on creating minimal scenarios and specialized users who duplicate the entities that specially apply to them in order to match all or part of the model to reality and/or to their forecasted scenarios.
This powerpoint file is a user manual with explanations and links to demonstration videosRoadmap
Roadmap
No$, key to developers of large spreadsheet models, will be distributed in France and abroad through the Microsoft AppSource site, before being available through the Apple AppStore and via the Internet (dongle) as an offline version.
InterSyntax will continue to enhance the benefits provided by No$ for developers and users of models by improving its interfaces, by adding new functionalities, by integrating No$ on other spreadsheet solutions and by sharing the user’s know-how (seminars, webinars, workshops, videos…).