Hillmaker FAQ Summary: Frequently Asked Questions about Hillmaker Author: Mark Isken (isken@oakland.edu) Posting-Frequency: Monthly Language: English $Date: 2005/09/20 9:14 $ $Revision: 0.8 $ Introduction Q. What is Hillmaker? A. Hillmaker is a Microsoft Access add-in that can be used to create statistical and graphical summaries of arrival, departure and occupancy patterns by time of day for systems having entities flowing into and out of some location. Hillmaker includes the following main components: * an MS Access form based add-in that calculates the various statistics and stores them in Access tables, * an MS Excel based spreadsheet that can be used to create graphs from Hillmaker output. Q. Who would use such a tool? A. Hillmaker was developed in response to many practical analysis problems arising in health care delivery systems such as hospitals and outpatient clinics. It has been used by operations analysts, management engineers and other such analytical folk. A journal publication describing its use in this environment is: Isken, M.W. (2002) “Modeling and Analysis of Occupancy Data: A Healthcare Capacity Planning Application,” International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making, 1, 4 (December) 707-729. Q. Who develops and maintains Hillmaker? A. Hillmaker is currently developed and maintained by Mark Isken, Department of Decision and Information Sciences, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA. E-mail: . Q. How is Hillmaker licensed? A. Hillmaker is currently licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). GLPK is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. Q. Where is the Hillmaker home page? http://hillmaker.sourceforge.net Q. Why was Hillmaker developed in MS Access? A. This is simply a result of its history. It started out as a DOS Basic application many years ago, was ported to FoxPro, and then to MS Access when it became available. Q. Are there plans to port it to an open source database and spreadsheet platform? A. Yes. Would you like to help? Q. How do I download and install Hillmaker? See InstallAndQuickStart.doc. Q. Is there a Hillmaker mailing list or newsgroup? A. For now, just the default Forums are available on the SourceForge site. Q. Who maintains this FAQ and how do I contribute to this FAQ? A. The present maintainer of this FAQ is Mark Isken (isken@oakland.edu). All contributions to this FAQ, such as questions and (preferably) answers should be sent to the email address. This FAQ is copyright Mark Isken 2005 and is released under the same license, terms and conditions as Hillmaker, that is, GPL version 2 or later. Contributions are not directly referenced in the body of the FAQ as this would become unmanageable and messy, but rather as a list of contributors to this FAQ. If you are the author of any information included in this FAQ and you do not want your content to be included, please contact the FAQ maintainer and your material will be removed. Also if you have not been correctly included as a contributor to this FAQ, your details have changed, or you do not want your name listed in the list of contributors, please contact the FAQ maintainer for correction. Q. Where can I download this FAQ? http://hillmaker.sourceforge.net/hillmaker-faq.txt Q. Who are the FAQ contributors? A. The FAQ contents were created from the following sources: * Mark Isken Hillmaker functions & features Q. What is the current state of Hillmaker development? A. Version 0.8 is the current version and it works. There are a number of issues however that require work: * No online help exists * A good install procedure is needed to cope with the fact that different versions of MS Office use different object libraries. This might be especially problematic for things like the chart control, calendar control and file dialog controls. * The graphing spreadsheets need some enhancements (e.g. stacked bar percentiles not implemented, capacity line not implemented) Q. Why not use a statistics package instead of Hillmaker? A. You certainly could, though I imagine you'd end up writing scripts that mimic Hillmaker's logic. If you're a wizard with some stat package then run Hillmaker and duplicate its outputs in your favorite stat package and then tell us all how you did it. :) Q. What input file formats does Hillmaker support? A. At this point, since Hillmaker is an Access add-in, it only works with either native Access tables or linked SQL Server tables. I haven't had a chance to test it with other linked tables (e.g. MySQL or Oracle) but would guess it would work. Q. Where can I find some examples? A. Hillmaker distribution includes a sample database called SampleData.mdb that contains a raw data table as well as sample output tables from a Hillmaker run. Q. What are the future plans for Hillmaker? A. Developments planned for Hillmaker include: * Generalize to multiple category fields * Generalize to allow accumulation of "workload" instead of just occupancy. This will help with healthcare staffing studies. * Port it to OpenOffice environment (or some other open source platform) * Make the graphing spreadsheets more powerful and useful. Q. How do I report a Hillmaker bug? A. If you think you have found a bug in Hillmaker, please submit a bug report through the bug tracking system in SourceForge for the Hillmaker project. Q. How do I contribute to the Hillmaker development? A. TBD - I'm new to this open source development thing and I'm still figuring out best way to proceed. Suggestions welcome.