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Tess is a new Windows-based software product that can help you overcome problems with traditional spreadsheets
and provide you with easy access to abilities that only advanced users have had in the past.
Spreadsheet Problems |
The Tess Advantage |
- Duplicate formulas across cells
- Maintenance errors
- Easy to deceive
- Features out of reach
- Friendly formulas
- Expandable groups
- No help with values over time
- Timing differences hard to resolve
- Rework to change report timing
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- Fewer Errors
- One formula vs. many cell duplicates
- Convenient formula manager
- Easier to Use
- Self explanatory formulas
- Auto grouping
- More Power
- Separation of formulas from reporting
- Time aware data and reporting
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Special Features in Tess
Tess includes a host of special features that can take you far beyond spreadsheets.
Item independence of cells
This is the primary difference between Tess and traditional spreadsheets: Tess has items whose formulas are independent of the report cells.
If the formula results in a different size range of answers, Tess automatically reformats for you.
Item Names
Tess helps you create better models by prompting you to name items. You can display item names in reports, or remove them. If you change the name of an item, Tess automatically applies
the change in all formulas that reference the item. Your models get better and better.
Formulas
Tess has hundreds of formulas to enable you to do what you’ve done before in spreadsheets, but because Tess allows you to easily manipulate ranges of data, we’ve added some
specialized functions to help with common operations, such as Series and Cumulative Sum.
Formula Panel
When you are editing a formula, the Properties panel will prompt you for the parameters, so you don’t have to memorize what comes first in a function.
Items Manager
In addition to the Formula Panel, Tess also includes an Items Manager. The Items Manager can help you with organization, auditing, and model construction and maintenance.
Here we have a collection of all of the items used in a model – all of them. No more wondering if there’s another formula hiding in your spreadsheet. In the Items Manager you can directly
create items, change formulas, and more.
One of the powerful auditing and maintenance tools Tess gives you is the ability to see relationships in your model. For example, Tess includes a Requires button that will change the Items Manager to
show you all of the dependencies of an item. Possibly even more important, however, is the Affects button. This will show you all of the items that will change if you change this one.
Although we stress and encourage item usage, you will still get these same auditing advantages when using old style cell calculations. Other spreadsheets would do well to include this ability!
Tess: fewer formulas = fewer errors;
more powerful operations = higher productivity
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