FAQ
(Please also read the walk-through. For more information and discussion please have a look at the website for the Annalisa community, www.cafeannalisa.org.uk.)
- What's a weighting?
- What's a rating?
- What's a score?
- What's an option?
- What's an attribute?
- Where's the settings window?
- What's normalisation?
- What are positive attributes and negative attributes?
- How many options and attributes can I (must I) have?
- What if I need more options or attributes?
- What's the difference between the demo version and the full version?
- What are the system requirements to run Annalisa?
- What data formats are compatible with Annalisa?
- How do I install Annalisa?
- How do I use the licence key?
- Why/When should I buy multiple licences?
- How do I buy multiple licences?
- What discounts do you offer for multiple licences?
- I can't install Annalisa, what should I do?
A weighting is the relative degree of importance you attach to an attribute. For example, we're rarely at home, so Neighbourhood is not of great importance to us. But we often need to pick-up milk or bread on our way home and so we've given Local Shops a higher weighting (30%) than Neighbourhood (20%). Transport is most important to us at 40%. (We don’t have children so we don’t have ‘Schools’ as an attribute.) The weighting of an individual attribute must be a number between 0 and 100% (or .00 and 1.00) and Annalisa ensures your set of weightings for all your Attributes adds to 100% (or 1.00), whether or not you have normalisation turned on in Settings. See What’s normalisation?
A rating is the degree to which an attribute is present in an option, or how much an option meets the attribute (or, when the attribute is an outcome, the probability that the option will generate this outcome). For example, in the South where we currently live, the gardens are bigger than in the north, where space is at a premium. So we rate the South at 70% on this attribute, compared with 10% for the North.
A score is the outcome for each Option given the current ratings and weightings. It is arrived at by multiplying the Option’s rating for each Attribute by the Weighting for that attribute and summing across all the attributes. In our example, the score shows us that the North is where we should live. The North did not rank highest in all attributes, but because we weighted the attribute where the north did badly as less important, it came out on top, with West next. The score of .61 for the North comes from:
| Neighbourhood | rated at 0.6 x weighting of 0.2 | = .12 |
| Garden | rated at 0.1 x weighting of 0.1 | = .01 |
| Transport | rated at 0.6 x weighting of 0.4 | = .24 |
| Shops | rated at 0.8 x weighting of 0.3 | = .24 |
| Score | = .61 |
An option is a potential course of action, like 'move north' in our example. Generally speaking it is one of a set of things that you are judging, selecting from, or evaluating. Options may be policies, strategies, programs, projects, applicants, assignments, objects… in fact anything about which judgments or decisions need to be made and in which multiple considerations (attributes) are relevant.
An attribute is something to take into account when making a judgement or decision (i.e. selecting from a set of options). It may be called many other things depending on the context – a criterion, a consideration, a quality, a characteristic, an indicator, a factor – but in every case the task is to rate each option in relation to each attribute and then weigh each attribute in relation to the other attributes. If an attribute has 0 (zero) weight then it isn’t really an attribute for this decision. (If you don't have, or plan to have, kids, then Schools will not be an attribute in your move decision, though it may be a highly weighted attribute for others). In some situations it may be a good idea (for transparency and flexibility) to include such an attribute and explicitly assign it zero weight.
You can change your settings in Annalisa at any time by
clicking on the 
icon, at the top-right of the Annalisa screen.
Annalisa arrives at a score based on the relative importance assigned to each of the attributes and hence requires that their weights add up to 100% (percentages) or 1.00 (decimals). But you can choose to assign weights with normalisation turned on or off. If normalisation is on, your weights will always sum to 1.0 (decimal) or 100 (percentages) and every time you change a weighting value all the other values will be changed proportionately to ensure this. If you turn normalisation off, you can assign any numbers to your attributes you like (subject to each one being between 0 and 100%). Normalisation will still be used in calculating the scores, so turning normalisation off simply makes it easier for you to set individual weights by (a) allowing all the bar areas to be larger and (b) preventing the dynamic alteration to all other weights in the way mentioned above. For example we might prefer to enter 40, 20, 80, 60 as our percentage weights in our example. These add to 200% but the resulting scores will be exactly the same because Annalisa will normalise them to 20, 10, 40, 30.
What are positive attributes and negative attributes?
In the settings window, under the Topics tab, you choose between pursuing this topic with either positive attributes or negative attributes. (The default is Positive.) Put simply, you must decide whether all your attributes are to be phrased as good/desirable things, or all as bad/undesirable things. They can’t be a mixture of both. In our example, we're thinking of Neighbourhood, Garden, Transport and Shops as good things. What if Crime was an additional (negative) consideration for us? Having adopted a Positive format we would need to phrase this attribute as Lack of Crime. A Negative format will often be the simple and appropriate one, such as in medicine and health. In this case a positive attribute such as ‘easy to use’ will need to be phrased as ‘difficult to use’. Annalisa assigns the highest score to the best option whichever format you use, so you don’t need to worry about this – you just rate the options on the attribute as specified. Just remember that if an option rates highly on a positive attribute (Easy to Use) it will rate lowly on the corresponding negative attribute (Difficult to Use).
How many options and attributes can I (must I) have?
You can have a maximum of 10 options and 10 attributes. You must have at least 1 of each! If you need more than 10 x 10, create 1 top-level topic and then lower-level sub-topics that drill-down into more detail. For example, Neighbourhood might be regarded as itself having multiple attributes.
What if I need more options or attributes?
If the 10 options/attributes available in the full version are not enough, you can create a 'drill-down' effect using multiple topic files. For example, we could have set our home buying topic to only cover local amenities, with attributes such as Parks, Parking, Bars, Schools. We could create 3 more topics to account for transport links (with attributes like Minutes To Bus Stop, Number of Bus Lines, Proximity to Train Station, Frequency of Trains), safety and affordability. Then we could create a 'meta' topic that took the scores of each of these 4 'sub-topics' in 4 headings: Local Amenities; Transport; Safety; Affordability. This would allow us to easily work with the 4 major topics, and drill-down into more detail if necessary.
What's the difference between the demo version and the full version?
| Demo | Full | |
|---|---|---|
| Max. number of options/attributes | 4 | 10 |
| Can save topic file | No | Yes |
| Can copy topic image | No | Yes |
What are the system requirements to run Annalisa?
Annalisa runs on Windows 98 and above. You will need a minimum of 256MB RAM and 10MB of disk space on your hard drive. No other software is required in order to run Annalisa. There is currently no version available for the Mac.
What data formats are compatible with Annalisa?
Annalisa has its own file format for storing data.
These are recognised by the .alt file extension. All topics saved
in Annalisa will, by default, be saved as .alt files. In addition,
Annalisa can import data from other programs. The data must be saved
in .csv (comma separated values) format. Annalisa can export topic
data also in .csv format. This allows you to use the topic data in
other programs, like Excel. In addition, you can export an image of
the Annalisa screen in either .bmp or .jpg format. To export to .csv,
or save an image, click on the 
icon and select the appropriate format from "Save as type:".
Whether you want to try out the demo version, or have paid for the licence key, the first thing you must do is download the Annalisa demo. Once you have saved this file to your local machine, double-click with the left mouse button to install the demo on your computer. (Note: if have trouble installing the demo, read this FAQ entry.) You will be taken through the installation process. Once completed, Annalisa is ready-to-use. If you have purchased the licence key and want to know how to use it, read this FAQ entry.
You can check the status of your Annalisa installation by
clicking on the
icon and then clicking on the About tab. You can see that you are
using either a demo copy, or the full registered version. Once you
have purchased your licence key from www.annalisa.org.uk/buy/
you will receive the licence key via e-mail (you can also download the licence
key from a link given to you once your purchase has completed. This
link will be valid for 7 days). You should save this key to your computer,
and keep a back-up of it somewhere, in case you need to reinstall Annalisa.
Once you have installed the Annalisa demo, you need to double-click on the
licence key to register your copy of Annalisa. You must enter the
same registration name as you used during purchase. That's it, you're
now registered. To verify the registration was successful, look at
the registration information again by clicking the
icon and clicking on the About tab.
Why/When should I buy multiple licences?
When you purchase the licence key for Annalisa, you are buying the licence to run the full version of Annalisa for yourself solely. If you want your colleagues to also be able to use Annalisa on their machines, then you need to buy as many licences as the number of machines on which you want to run the full version (you can of course run the demo version on as many computers as you like, for free). If it helps, you can think of the licence key as licencing the full version of Annalisa for a single machine. Multiple machines means multiple licences. We keep the cost of Annalisa low and offer discounts for multiple purchases. By buying the correct number of licences, you are helping us to maintain these low prices.
How do I buy multiple licences?
To purchase multiple licences, follow these instructions: (Note: please make sure you have downloaded and installed the demo first!)
- Go to the purchase page.
- Click 'Add to cart'.
- In the Qty box, enter the number of licences you require and click 'Update'. The price will be recalculated, automatically taking into account any discount.
- Once you have updated the quantity, and have checked both the Qty box and the total amount to be debited, click 'Checkout'. Please make sure you check the amounts before continuing, as mistakes cannot be rectified once processed.
What discounts do you offer for multiple licences?
We offer the following discounts for customers wishing to buy multiple licences:
| Quantity | Cost per Licence |
|---|---|
| 1 Licence | £14.99 |
| 3 Licences | £13.99 |
| 5 Licences | £12.99 |
| 10 Licences | £11.99 |
| 20 Licences | £9.99 |
If you are medium or large organisation and require a much larger quantity of licences, please contact us directly.
I can't install Annalisa, what should I do?
If you have downloaded the demo file and tried to install Annalisa, but your machine has refused to install the program, the most likely reason is that you do not have rights to install software on that machine. If you are on a network (e.g. your computer belongs to your organisation/institution/company, and is maintained by them), contact your network administrator and ask them to install the software for you. If your machine is a stand-alone computer (e.g. at home, or your laptop) then you need to login with Administrator privileges in order to install Annalisa.