SIMUL8 expert? What you’ll like the most in 2012.

Written by Frances Sneddon on Wednesday May 2nd 2012 in What We're Doing, What We're Thinking

SIMUL8 expert? What you’ll like the most in 2012.

With every new release as well as making lots of features to make SIMUL8 easier and better for people new to simulation, we make sure we don’t forget about our loyal long term users. How could we, here at S8 Headquarters we’ve got lots of consultants and trainers using SIMUL8 daily, so when you’re not requesting features on our Support Desk they’re shouting on your behalf!

So if you’ve been using SIMUL8 for awhile what features will you like the best?

Spreadsheets in Dialogs

As a SIMUL8 user my favorite feature this year is the ability to add spreadsheets into a custom dialog. Why do I like this so much? I’m a big fan of creating interfaces for your simulation so that you can easily share your simulation with anyone without them having to learn anything about SIMUL8. Before 2012 you could have radio buttons, edit boxes etc. But that structure was quite restrictive. You could have displayed a SIMUL8 spreadsheet to get a bit more creative freedom, but it was within the edit style dialog so you could get users going off doing crazy things in cells you don’t want them to touch and also just didn’t look as professional and simple as a custom dialog.

So now you can get the spreadsheet right inside the custom dialog which means:

You can seamlessly integrate into a wizard chain of dialogs
You can make use of the on open and on close visual logic events for a dialog
The header rows and columns are automatically hidden for you so your spreadsheet looks great
You can control how many cells are shown, so the user only ever sees what you want them to see

Search label values

So I know I’m only supposed to pick one favorite, but it’s impossible with so many great features to choose from.

Searching label values is a tiny little feature but it is going to make life so much easier for you. You know when you’ve set up labels in your simulation to uniquely identify certain work items. When you’re validating your simulation you want to track these through or work out where your part is at a key time point. Well previously you had to set up some message boxes in Visual Logic or trawl through all the contents dialogs.

Not now! Now, you can just hit search label values and you can search every work item in your simulation for a specific label value. This will radically reduce the time to validate your simulation. One of our consultants literally screamed with joy when we revealed this feature in our internal taster sessions.

The rest

There’s still lots of other little features you’re going to love, like jump start and our new visual logic commands. Check out our SIMUL8 2012 feature tour for details on all the new features.

I really hope you love SIMUL8 2012 as much as we do. And start sending in your requests for SIMUL8 2013 now, we’re already busy working on it.