More about Biotools

Thanks for using Biological Tools.

It has been a lot of fun putting this together and I hope someone gets some use out of it besides myself. I now know a whole lot more about diversity indices than I ever thought I would so I can say that this has been a learning experience as well as a fun one.

I'll try to sum up what is here.

Part One:
The entire add-in started out as some user-defined functions I had written for myself and some friends. These have been expanded, beefed up to handle some extreme situations (typos in the data, empty cells, etc.) and described in (I think) pretty good detail (SAMPLE.XLS). These functions can be typed directly into cells or inserted with the function wizard. See the text file biofnct.txt for some further instructions, however, I have not been updating it for the last few changes.

Part Two:
This has been the fun part for me. Th diversity tool is a macro that allows you to select an input range (your dataset) and describe it (give some input as to how it is set up) and then have the macro calculate all eight (at this time) indices, put them on the selected output range or a new sheet and optionally output SAS ready files (a dataset and a macro to read the dataset). I think this has the potential of being very useful once I have tuned and polished it. Any suggestions or complaints are greatly appreciated as to the operation and output of the diversity tool.

Part Three:
SAMPLE.XLS. This is my substitute for not knowing how to prepare Windows Help Files. Tell me what you think should be added to it.

Installation:
See biofnct.txt.

Price:
Absolutely Free. I like to get free stuff and I'm sure you do too. If you think this thing is great and you feel like you just have to pay for then by all means, send me some cash. I'll take the kids to McDonalds and dedicate a Big Mac to you. I would very much like to hear your opinions, favorable or unfavorable.

Warranty:
It has the ZIP warranty. Once you unzip it the warranty is over.

John Hanks
P. O. Box 15529
Nacogdoches, TX 75962
e-mail:g_hanksjb@titan.sfasu.edu