ImagineIT overview
Exploring data
Modelling
Advanced modelling
List of toolbar buttons
Handy hints for Excel
Try the toolbar
Buy the toolbar
Maths in Action book

Quick format buttons

The following simple buttons on the toolbar make editing spreadsheets a little easier:

Shortening the toolbar to leave only formatting buttons

If you just want to switch the ImagineIT Toolbar off except for the formatting options, click this button . (The graph buttons described below then just change the format of an existing graph and cannot be used to create new graphs.) To switch the full toolbar on again click the same button. The shortened toolbar looks like this:

An example of data exploration using graphs

To practise setting up a data exploration spreadsheet for yourself, click Data exploration in the menu on the left.

To download the example, right-click and save to your hard disc: HousePrices.xls

ImagineIT has powerful graph plotting features. These enable you to quickly plot different columns in a data table against one another using whatever type of chart or graph is most appropriate - bar chart, pie chart, x-y plot, etc. Unlike the Excel graph plotting wizard, ImagineIT only needs to be told once where to find the data for adding titles to graphs and labelling axes and individual plots.

Because of this you can generate several different graphs very quickly showing different quantities and all of them will be automatically titled and labelled.

Not only is it easy to produce new graphs, it is also simple to change what is plotted on either axis - just two clicks with the mouse are all that is needed.

The result is a very straightforward and fast method of exploring data graphically.

The next illustration shows graphs of various sorts produced using the HousePrices spreadsheet. To download it right-click HousePricesGraphs.xls .

An example model

To practise setting up a spreadsheet model for yourself, click Modelling in the menu on the left.

To download the example, right-click and save to your hard disc: Population.xls

To write a spreadsheet based model (or to perform calculations based on numerical data), you normally have:

• a table containing columns of values (which can be both numerical values and calculated quantities)

• cells containing quantities that have just one value - these can be numerical values and calculated quantities, and they are often constants or parameters of some sort

ImagineIT enables you to set up one or two tables and up to five blocks of single-valued quantities, (referred to as parameters).

When you have downloaded the spreadsheet and opened it, try clicking the button to see the formulae and then the button to return to showing values.

The next illustration shows how ImagineIT makes it easy to use names in formulae. These names are automatically applied to individual cells or columns of cells when typed into rows that you choose to use as names rows (red type on a blue background).

Names make model formulae much easy to read, understand, and get right, than cell references (although these can also be used).
Notice that you can also prefix a name with the four letters last and it will then refer to a value in the preceding row. This is extremely useful for iterative or step by step calclulations.

Another extremely valuable feature of the toolbar for modelling is the ability to overlay several graphs for different values of the model parameters. Without the toolbar this is something that is very hard and time-consuming to do. The toolbar does it by allowing you to freeze copies of plots so that they no longer change when the spreadsheet data changes.

(In order to be able to do this the toolbar uses a separate sheet to store the frozen data. You never need to look at this sheet yourself - it is the sheet with the GDS tab in the illustrations.)