Collect Measures Panel

When you collect measures from a collection, a new collection is made in which these measures are stored (see Collect Measures and Other Results). This new measures collection has a Collect Measures panel that gives you control over the process. The default settings are that animation is on, newly collected measures are added to existing measures, and five measures are collected.

Each of the available options is described below.

“Animation on” checkbox

When checked, the collecting measures process will include animation of gold balls from the source collection to the measures collection. All graphs and tables will update continuously during the sampling. When you uncheck this option, measures are collected much more quickly, but little updating happens during the process. If the measures collection is collecting measures from a sample collection (a common setup), turning off animation for the measures collection also turns off the sampling animation.

“Replace existing cases” checkbox

If this is checked, Fathom will empty out the measures collection before starting the collecting process. For most simulations involving collecting measures, the preferred mode is to keep adding measures to the collection.

“Re-collect measures when source changes” checkbox

The idea here is that you can get Fathom to automatically collect more measures when anything changes in the source collection. Frequently, the change is driven by a slider that you are dragging or animating. As the slider changes, formulas in the source collection change, and more measures are collected. (You usually want to set number of measures to collect to one.)

If there are several formulas changing, Fathom collects new measures for each formula change. Though this is not usually what you want, it also usually doesn’t hurt.

“Measures” field

Edit this value to change the number of cases that the measures collection will collect.

“Until condition”

Clicking this button brings up the formula editor, ready for you to type a true/false expression. Collecting measures will continue until this expression evaluates to true.

Note: It is easy to get into a situation in which the collecting measures process does not stop! Press Esc on the computer keyboard.

“Collect More Measures” button

Clicking this button causes more measures to be collected. Note that there is also a menu command available to do this when the measures collection is selected. Also, if you open a measures collection, there is a Collect More Measures button at the top right of the open collection.