• The new Professional version 6.0 is fully integrated with Microsoft’s Ribbon interface (for Excel and Office 2007), and it incorporates other improvements which we think represent overall a major advance in usability. For more details see below and on other pages.
• The new Personal version (version 3.4) now incorporates Inter-Sheet Logic and Comparison functions as well as other improvements, and it is still completely free for personal, non-commercial use.

You can download and try out both versions on our Download page; and if you’re a spreadsheet professional using Excel 2003 or earlier, we are continuing to offer our well-established Professional version 5.1.

If you’re currently an individual (single licence) user of Rainbow Analyst Professional version 5.1, you can upgrade to version 6.0 without charge. If you are a corporate (site licence) user, please contact us for upgrade information.

The new version version occupies a separate “Rainbow” tab on the Ribbon (click above to see the full-size image), which has allowed us to arrange and group Rainbow’s functions much more clearly than on the previous drop-down menu. There is also a “supertip” for each function which briefly explains its use when you hover the mouse over it.

The new version has also enabled us to implement interactive functionality in place of two Rainbow features that used to involve a slightly clunky use of Excel worksheets. The first such feature is the set of cell mapping options that determine how Rainbow colours or maps different types or groups of cells. You can now view and interactively edit all these options from the Cell Mapping button on the Ribbon (as above). And if you have created a Rainbow map and want to check what the different colours mean, you can now do so quickly and easily by clicking the Cell Mapping button.

The other Rainbow function that is now interactive is the User Guide. We realised that most users were not making much use of this, and so we have now made available nearly all sections of the User Guide in the form of context-sensitive help, which can be accessed from the new Help button on nearly all dialog boxes.

In addition to these changes, we have also included a number of other minor enhancements:

• a date and time stamp on all reports (as shown on our Example page;
• a message advising when the Compare Worksheets function has not found any matching sheets to compare;
• improvements in the way Rainbow deals with protected sheets and chart sheets.

So if you’re using Excel 2007, go to our Downloads page and try version 6.0 for yourself!

We’re also working on the next release of Rainbow Analyst Professional, which will take full advantage of the Office Ribbon, so watch this space for further news. (And please let us know if there are specific features you’d really like to see included in future releases!)

These are unsolicited ratings, and we are delighted at this further recognition of the quality of our product.

Version 5.1 does not directly use Microsoft’s Ribbon interface, but it appears inside an Add-Ins tab on the Ribbon, where you can access the Rainbow menu and toolbar. The steps for installing and trouble-shooting Rainbow Analyst under Office 2007 are quite different from previous versions of Excel, so we have now included full details of the Office 2007 procedures on other pages of our site.

If you currently have a single-user licence for version 5.0, you can download and install version 5.1 for free from the Download page of our website. If you have a corporate site licence, please contact us for details of how to upgrade.

Now that version 5 has been available for over a year, we are offering the chance for users of earlier versions to upgrade for free if you have a single-user licence, or for a nominal charge of £99.00 if you have a corporate site licence.

You can download the latest single-user version of Rainbow Analyst from our Download page. This requires a different licence key from earlier versions, so please contact us to obtain your upgraded licence key, or for details of how to upgrade your corporate site licence version of Rainbow Analyst Professional.

Rainbow Analyst Personal has been selected for listing as freeware on the Softpedia software database, and has been certified by Softpedia to be completely clean of adware/spyware components.

For more details and to download your own copy, please visit our Download page, where you can also find details of our flagship product, Rainbow Analyst Professional. This has also been selected for listing on the Softpedia software database, and has been certified by Softpedia to be completely clean of adware/spyware components.

And in version 5.0 you can now put all your reports and maps in the same workbook (instead of each being a separate single-worksheet workbook). If you wish, you can even append them as additional worksheets in the workbook you are analysing.

Version 5.0 also includes important enhancements to Rainbow’s core functionality, of which the following are just a selection:

• The new Summary Report gives you a high-level view of a workbook, including e.g. data on Visual Basic code modules and average and maximum formula length per sheet, so that you can assess potential problem areas before starting detailed analysis.
• The Inter-Sheet Logic reports can now group relevant copied formulas together, producing a much more compact and readable report. And this technique has enabled us to speed up the inter-sheet precedents report by an order of magnitude, so that you can now quickly and easily generate a complete inter-sheet precedents report even for a model of some size.
• Nearly all Rainbow’s functions can now generate a report (grouping copied formulas where appropriate), rather than simply applying colour to the relevant cells. This means that Rainbow can now provide a much more comprehensive set of tools for use in a structured model audit process.

Cell Inspector uses a complex probabilistic scoring system to generate the cell descriptions; the screenshot on the left is a good example of how this works. Although of course the descriptions cannot be guaranteed to be 100% accurate in every single case, they have been proved to be highly reliable across a range of financial models, and they can provide a very fast indication of possible faulty logic.

As an example, suppose you run Cell Inspector on cell H74 in sheet Operations, and Cell Inspector shows this as Availability Fee – 30/09/2013, with the formula “=Inputs!H101*(1-$C$26)”. If you then look at Cell Inspector’s list of Precedents and see that Inputs!H101 is Availability Charge – 30/09/2012, you can immediately spot that there may be a problem with misaligned columns in different sheets referring to different time periods.

If you come across a complex formula, perhaps with several nested IF() statements, you can click on the Parse Formula button to see a structured layout of the formula which will quickly identify which are the relevant components of each IF() statement. And at any time you can click the Minimise button so that you can see the parts of the worksheet which may be hidden by the Cell Inspector dialogue box.

For example, an employee at a US investment fund omitted the minus sign on a figure of $1.2 billion while transferring data between spreadsheets, thus “creating” a $2.3 billion gain instead of the actual $0.1 billion loss. The company announced to shareholders a distribution of $4.32 a share; a month later, when the error was detected, it had to announce that there would be no distribution (further information at Dr. Panko’s website; see “Other sites”).

The vast majority of such errors could have been avoided by following a small number of key quality principles in building models, as explained below. (References to spreadsheet features assume the use of Microsoft Excel^TM, but are equally applicable to other spreadsheet software.)