What are some of the applications of SVB?

There are countless applications for Statistica Visual Basic ranging from recording simple macros to automate routine tasks, to the development of large scale, powerful applications that take full advantage of advanced technologies offered in Statistica. The following is a selection of examples.

• You can record macro programs of your analyses to fully document all your work; by playing back the macro programs, you can recreate exactly the analyses that you performed while recording the macro (see How can I record my analysis in an SVB program?).
• You can record macro programs of some standard analyses (reports) that you perform routinely on updated datafiles; you can then perform these routine analyses by simply running the macro program; note that practically all Statistical procedures and options are accessible via Statistica Visual Basic.
• You can combine the recorded macro programs of multiple analyses into a single complex program; by running this program you can then automatically create a suite of analyses where, for example, some Statistical computations are performed on the results from preceding analyses (see How can I access results spreadsheets, graphs, workbooks etc.?).
• You can modify recorded macro programs to create highly customized new Statistical analyses; e.g., you could first compute the means for a set of variables, and then make customized plots of those means.
• You can program custom computational subroutines, using, for example, the extensive Statistica matrix library; in this manner, you can develop and prototype your own custom Statistical procedures.
• You can include complex custom user interfaces in your programs; this allows you to build simple or complex custom applications, using the Statistica library of Statistical and computational procedures (see Can I create custom dialogs and other interactive user input controls in SVB?).
• You can fully customize the "behavior" of Statistica itself, by including custom procedures for various events; for example, you can call a macro program every time the user opens a datafile, requiring the user to "sign in" with a password (see What are application events and how can they be controlled from SVB?).
• You can fully customize the toolbars and options of Statistica, to produce a customized "look and feel" for specialized tasks (e.g., for data entry only); you can also create toolbars, toolbar buttons, or pop-up menus and attach macro programs to run custom procedures (see Can I customize the toolbars and menus via SVB?).
• You can access from Statistica Visual Basic the libraries of other (Visual Basic) compatible programs; this allows you to include in your programs the specialized procedures and add-ins provided by other software (see Can I expand my SVB by calling external DLLs?).
• You can access all Statistica libraries from compatible Visual Basic programming environments; this allows you to program, for example, Microsoft Excel macro programs that automatically perform various computations in Statistica, and transfer the results back to a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet (see Can I execute an SVB program from within other visual basic compatible applications?).

Performance of Statistica Visual Basic programs. While the obvious advantage of Visual Basic (compared to other languages) is its ease of use and familiarity to a very large number of computer users, the possible drawback of VB programs is that they do not perform as fast as applications developed in lower-level programming languages (such as C). However, that potential problem will not apply to Statistica Visual Basic applications, especially those that rely mostly on executing calls to Statistica analytic, graphics, and data management procedures. These procedures fully employ the Statistica technology and they will perform at a speed comparable to running the respective procedures in Statistica directly.