Spreadsheet Models for Managers
Getting Access to Spreadsheet Models for Managers
If 
you use Excel to model businesses, business processes, or
business transactions, this course will change your life. You’ll learn how to create tools for yourself that will amaze
even you. Unrestricted use of this material is available in two ways.
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Spreadsheet Models for Managers
Session 2
Analysis and Synthesis
Summary of Pages
The technique in which we decompose a problem into parts, and then deal with the parts is called analysis. In synthesis, we reassemble the parts to obtain the solution to the original problem. For many problems, only this approach makes them tractable.
But when we try it, we can still get lost in a maze of details and complexity. To limit this risk, Excel offers a variety of tools, the most valuable of which are array arithmetic and matrix products. These methods enable us to deal with arrays of data at a very high level, reducing the need to enter formulas in individual cells, removing from the formulas any dependence on the size of the arrays, and reducing the number of cells that we have to maintain.
These methods are powerful. And the best part is: relatively few people use them or even understand them. Many of our students have remarked that these techniques alone justified the effort and cost of taking this course.
Below is a summary of pages for Session 2.
- Review of Last Time
- Analysis and synthesis
- Example of analysis and synthesis
- Implementation
- Arrays in Excel
- Array arithmetic
- Matrix multiplication
- Matrix multiplication examples
- Transposing matrices
- Application examples
- The main points
- Reference reading
- Nexttime
Links to other materials for Session 2.
Last Modified: Wednesday, 27-Apr-2016 04:15:26 EDT
For many of you, matrix multiplication and array arithmetic are new ideas. It’s easy to get lost in the details of how they work and then forget about why we use them.
To keep a clear view of the forest and avoid focusing only on the trees, remember why we use matrix multiplication and array arithmetic. Briefly, we use them because we find that it’s very often helpful to decompose a problem into parts (analysis), then do calculations on the parts, and finally reassemble the final solution from the results of those partial calculations (synthesis).
Matrix multiplication and array arithmetic provide us with very convenient methods for performing those intermediate calculations on the parts. They’re the tools that make analysis and synthesis so powerful.