Monte Carlo Simulations

[Dane Cooper]

There is an add-in program in Microsoft Excel that runs Monte Carlo
simulations (about 5,000 of them at a time). I have created a database in
Microsoft Access to gather the data I need and compute the means and
standard deviations I would need for the Monte Carlo simulation.

Rather than transferring the data from Access to Excel, is there an add-in
for Microsoft Access that would do the same thing? Or, even better, is
there a way to get Access to do the simulation?

Thanks in advance,

Dane

 

[LeAnne]

Hi Dane,

AFAIK, not directly. There is an Access add-in, FMS Total Access
Statistics, that is pretty nifty with univariate stats (parameteric and
nonparametric), but multivariate stats, resampling techniques etc. are
beyond its scope. Creating a custom procedure from scratch is beyond my
coding abilities, although there might be some who relish the challenge.
SAS, S-Plus, and JMP can all handle Access recordsets, but I'm pretty
sure you have to save them as .dbf files first.

While it may be possible to use automation to call the Excel functions
from within Access, I suggest linking the Excel worksheet to your db.
Then you can do your thing in either app thanks to ODBC, without having
to export or copy-and-paste to Excel.

hth,

LeAnne

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