Up Periscope A savage onslaught against the algebraic curtain By Bill Machrone 03.02.98 Every time I get my hands on software by Sam Savage, I get all inspired. It makes me realize how much more I could be doing with modeling, projections, optimizations and goal seeking. Sam was the author of What'sBest, perhaps the first Lotus 1-2-3 add-in product. It helped you do optimization and goal seeking. Sam has taught management science at the University of Chicago and at Stanford for the last 20 years, and he's always said that only about 10 percent of his students really understood the material, and only 10 percent of those went on to apply it. Since that realization, his goal has been to break down the mathematical barriers, to make it easier and understandable enough so that anyone handy with a spreadsheet can maximize his or her productivity/profit/whatever. Sam's visual, hands-on approach succeeds in tearing through the algebraic curtain. Sam's visual, hands-on approach succeeds in tearing through the algebraic curtain. His latest title is Insight.xla, a series of add-ins for Excel. More important, it's a book that's chock full of examples that take you through the simple pleasures (and perils) of modeling, simulations, queuing, decision trees, forecasting and optimization. His writing is refreshingly unstuffy and nonacademic, considering the weight of the subject matter. The software extends Excel's considerable statistical abilities by adding functions that support simulation, queuing, forecasting, capturing the output of repetitively run models and other handy functions. The book has numerous exercises, so if you've never explored the more esoteric features of Excel, here's your chance to do it under expert guidance. You can find out more about Sam and his work (check out the Shmuzzles!) at stanford.edu/~savage/. On a more familiar topic, I was wrong in my latest diatribe against overly mouse-centric programs when I said you can't get to the bookmarks with a the keyboard in Netscape Navigator 4.0. A simple Ctrl-B gets you there, and the Find (Ctrl-F) function works within it to speed you through large bookmark files. The arrow keys work properly, too, even to the extent of letting you expand and collapse folders. Similarly, Ctrl-H gets you to your history list, to revisit sites that you haven't bookmarked. All this is in strong contrast to Internet Explorer, which offers far fewer keyboard shortcuts, is much more mouse-dependent and is inconsistent at best in its user interface. Ed Mendelson responded to that column, too, and made these points: "Every software developer should have a copy of the Microsoft Press book, 'The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design,' which has a thorough list of keyboard shortcuts that every program should use. "Notes is probably the worst offender among standard Windows apps, but Java apps are even worse: I still haven't found one that uses the keyboard at all on its menus. "A rule at every development office should be that the programmers have to go one day without using a mouse. That would get some keyboard shortcuts back very, very quickly!" Bill Machrone is vice president of technology for Ziff-Davis Inc. He can be reached at bill_machrone@zd.com.