It is six months since STEM 7.3a was released in October 2012. Since that time we
have responded to and fixed a number of minor irritations in the software (which
have been patched to individual, affected customers), as well as making several
incremental enhancements to existing features.
There is no single compelling issue which warrants an update, but there is much
to be gained from everyone adopting a common system which includes all these fixes.
Most obviously it ensures consistency and reduces the risk of anyone else being
compromised by any of these issues going forward; more subtly it saves time and
avoids frustration if someone with one of the existing patches has to re-install
everything on a new machine.
So we have produced a STEM 7.3b maintenance release
which is now available as a recommended update for
all current STEM users. More than 30 minor improvements and corrections are listed
in the release notes, with some
highlights as follows:
- our original exported web interfaces were intended as self-contained pages, whereas
the HTML is now generated in a modular structure that can be readily included within
a master web-page layout which incorporates branding, legal notices and so on
- the results program now recognises certain results such as
Connections or Sites as integral and constrains
the value-axis labels so that fractional values are not displayed even for small
results
- a bug where the font size in chart legends was not saved is now fixed
- a chart drawn with the Draw Precedents command
in the results program would sometime end up with inappropriate scaling, but this
is now resolved
- the series labels for a tornado or snapshot chart no longer disappear when using
<Ctrl + Num Plus> or <Ctrl + Num Minus> to change the period for the
graph
- some broken help links around residual value have been amended
- a model could get into a state where any defined sensitivities would be run whenever
the model was run, whereas now they only run when explicitly requested
- references to whole columns and sheet-specific named ranges now work properly with
.xlsx files.
As you would expect, STEM 7.3b includes all patches
issued since the earlier STEM 7.3 and
STEM 7.3a releases.
Note: for compatibility with any future patches, it is essential to replace any
previous patches or provisional release candidates with this official STEM version
7.3b.