Welcome to the Education Alliance Newsletter. Although our program's name has changed, its goals remain in focus: continue to provide affordable software, to deliver an ever-growing set of tools and resources, and to establish Crystal Ball® software as an important part of your curricula.

Moving forward, each month's newsletter will feature a variety of informative articles, profiles, tips, and updates designed to help you better understand Crystal Ball software and integrate it into the classroom. I hope you enjoy this newsletter issue. As always, if you have questions or comments, or wish to add someone to the newsletter distribution list, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Warm regards,

Dan Mitzner
Marketing Manager, Crystal Ball Education Alliance
+1-303-626-0130 /education@crystalball.com

Introducing Crystal Ball 7.3

Building on more than two decades of experience in the predictive analytics business, Crystal Ball 7.3 offers users new features, efficiency improvements, and superior performance.  New features include:

• Windows Vista™ and Microsoft® Office 2007 Compatibility - Crystal Ball 7.3 is the first release of the software officially supported on both Office 2007 and Windows Vista.  Crystal Ball 7.3 now includes a new Microsoft Excel® 2007 ribbon for easy access to Crystal Ball software's tools and features.  Users will be able to benefit from the new capabilities found in Excel 2007.
  
  

• Scatter Charts - Crystal Ball 7.3 offers users the ability to create scatter charts, which display one set of numerical data along the x-axis and another along the y-axis.  Scatter charts display correlations, linear regression lines, and other relationships between pairs of forecasts and assumptions plotted against each other.  This additional investigative tool provides a visual way to make more informed decisions.

• Ability to start and stop Crystal Ball inside Microsoft Excel - After Excel has started, users can now open and close Crystal Ball manually or automatically, depending on their preferences.

Growing Classroom Partner- University of Illinois

The University of Illinois has recently grown its Classroom Partnership with Crystal Ball software to increase its role as part of the curriculum in their Finance program. We are excited about extending this program and conitnue to encourage all universities and colleges to teach simulation practices and Crystal Ball software.

Crystal Ball User Conference

The 2007 Crystal Ball User Conference will take place May 21-23 in beautiful Denver, Colorado. We are excited to showcase  outstanding case study presentations and workshops led by industry and academic leaders. 

We invite you to participate in interactive sessions and learn how expert modelers are successfully incorporating simulation and Crystal Ball software into their curricula.  Speakers and attendees are coming from schools that include Prague University, University of Phoenix, Florida International University and more. For more information, please see our conference brochure and conference schedule.  As a special discount, for every three people that register for the user conference from your school, the fourth is automatically free. 

To register or for more information e-mail or call: Mike Franden, Academic Senior Account Manager, 303-626-0118, or Jill Schnathorst, Academic Account Manager, 303-626-0123.

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Each month we like to take the opportunity to recognizes one of our Partners in Education. In doing this we hope to shed some light onto the various ways in which Crystal Ball software is being taught and incorporated into university classrooms, textbooks, and continuing education programs.

George Pinteris
Lecturer of Finance, University of Illinois- Urbana - Champaign

George Pinteris earned his B. S. degree from the University of Athens and an M.S. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined the faculty in the same year. He has been selected by his students for inclusion in the university’s “Incomplete List” of excellent teachers several times. He has served as a Lecturer in Economics and Associate Director of the MSPE Program, before becoming a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Finance. His areas of interest are banking and corporate finance, and he regularly teaches an undergraduate cases course in corporate finance.

Recent Publications

Pinteris, G. 2004. Financial Crises and Bank Risk: Evidence from U.S. Commercial Banks. Spoudai
Oltheten, E. , Pinteris, G., Sougiannis, T. 2003. "Greece in the European Union: Policy Lessons from Two Decades of Membership" Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 43: 774-806 SSRN Abstract
Pinteris, G. 2002. "Banking Crises and Bank Restructuring Policies". Hellenic Banking Association Quarterly Review

From the Desk of George Pinteris: Teaching Crystal Ball Software

"Crystal Ball is an integral part of the course titled Corporate Finance & Valuation that I teach during the summer. This is one of four required courses in the MSF program. The course covers financial statement analysis, cost of capital estimation, capital budgeting, stock and firm valuation techniques, and real options. Students practice financial modeling with Excel by using real company data for financial statement analysis and valuation.

"Financial modeling with Excel limits the analyst to specific assumptions about the model's drivers. At most, the analyst could explore the impact of the model's drivers on the variable(s) of interest through sensitivity analysis by varying two drivers at a time. The use of Monte Carlo techniques through Crystal Ball substantially enhances the model's capabilities by incorporating probabilistic analysis into the model. Students realize that uncertainty about the model's drivers is the key factor that impacts their findings, and that Monte Carlo techniques address that issue. They learn to present their findings in terms of probability of outcomes rather than a limited range of outcomes through sensitivity analysis. Crystal Ball is used to enhance the analysis of investment projects and the valuation of firms.

"Also, Crystal Ball's Real Options Analysis Toolkit™ allows me to demonstrate the valuation of real options through the use of decision trees. The wide range of option valuation templates included in the toolkit makes it easy for the instructor to focus on the intuition of the decision tree analysis without using a lot of class time to set up the tree in Excel. Real options are becoming standard part of capital budgeting analysis with many large corporations using them extensively to evaluate investment proposals.

"I like Crystal Ball because of its user friendly features in the application of Monte Carlo techniques. As an instructor, this allows me to devote more class time to explain the Monte Carlo approach and emphasize the need to incorporate it in financial modeling as well as to discuss the findings from the analysis."

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As part of our mission, the Education Alliance is continuously looking for ways to make Crystal Ball software fit seamlessly into your existing curricula. While there are many resources available through the Alliance, we also are turning to you, our Partners, for feedback, tips, and methods that might be useful to others in their classroom. If you have something you'd like to share, feel free to e-mail us and we'll include it in the next issue.

Professor Kits

To ease the implementation process for Crystal Ball software, we have put together these unique Professor Kits. Each kit is a free set of tools designed to equip professors with everything they need to teach Crystal Ball in their classroom. For more information on available kits or additional academic resources for your course, contact the Crystal Ball Education Alliance .

Invite Us to Your Campus!!

A large part what we do is visiting campuses around the world to present informational seminars on the importance of risk analysis, simulation and Crystal Ball software. Our goal for this program is to help introduce, in a short time, the basic principles of these important processes and how they are put to use by business professionals every day. Our seminars can be customized to fit your specific schedule and program. For more information, contact our Academic Marketing Manager

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The Education Alliance is continuously engaging authors on the forefront of their field to include Crystal Ball software as part of their textbook content. Beyond the content inclusion, you will also find that many of our Textbook Partners include free short term Textbook Editions of the software to be used in conjunction with the text.

"I chose to enclose Crystal Ball software in our book because we use it extensively in our courses, plus it is simply great software with a wide range of both theoretical and practical applications covered in our book."

-Jiri Hnilica, Associate Professor Department of Business Economics,
University of Economics, Czech Republic

Business Forecasting, 8e	Commercial Realestate- Analysis and Investments, 2e	Design for Six Sigma Statistics

For a full list of titles visit www.crystalball.com/books.html

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Crystal Ball and Minitab® - Complementary Tools for Statistical Automation
Andy Sleeper, Successful Statistics, LLC

Introduction
The explosive growth of Six Sigma methods in diverse industries has created a huge need for software to automate statistical analysis. Selection of the best tools for your company can be difficult.

A typical business uses three broad categories of software applications. At one extreme are general purpose applications, such as Microsoft Office and Lotus® Notes®. These applications are used by everyone and are typically selected by a central IT department. At the other extreme are specialized analysis tools used by only a few people for highly technical tasks. These applications are typically selected by users who have the advanced training to understand the methods.

In the middle are analytical automation tools. These are used by a broad base of people who want quick answers to tough problems. Those who select, purchase, and use these powerful tools may not be analytical experts, so these tools must be easy to learn and use.

This paper provides an overview of two leading statistical automation tools, Minitab and Crystal Ball. For engineers, scientists and anyone who works with data, Minitab and Crystal Ball provide complementary capabilities for the automation of statistical tasks. Minitab is a comprehensive statistical analysis application, while Crystal Ball runs and analyzes simulations of models representing physical systems. Both tools are easy to learn and have developed large, international user bases through a wide range of industries.

This paper describes the different types of problems Minitab and Crystal Ball are designed to solve. The major capabilities and features of each application are reviewed. Finally, the paper describes a case study in which both applications are used together to optimize the design of a new product.
Read Full Article

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It's important to us to attend all education-related conferences throughout the year. Not only does it provide an outlet for meeting new customers, but it gives us a chance to meet in person with many of our existing partners for some quality discussions. Please let us know if you are going to be in attendence at any of the following events. We'd love to meet with you.

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The Crystal Ball User Group (CBUG) is a Yahoo!® online forum where Crystal Ball users can discuss issues and methods related to Crystal Ball software. You can visit CBUG and register to become a member through the Crystal Ball Web site.

Latest topics: Extracting Parameters from Batch Fit Distributions Forecasting Fresh Produce Gross Rock Volume - Lognormal Crystal Ball and Linux Defining the Precision® and Size of Random numbers > Click here to visit CBUG and register to become a member

PLEASE NOTE: You have several message delivery options when you join, including whether or not to receive single or digest e-mails. You can also opt not to receive any e-mails and simply log onto the site every so often to view discussion.

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Mike Franden
Senior Account Manager- Education Alliance
800.289.2550 (toll free in US) / 303-626-0118
mfranden@crystalball.com

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