YASAI: Yet Another Add-in for Teaching Elementary Monte Carlo Simulation in Excel

This report describes YASAI (Yet Another Simulation Add-In), a tool for performing Monte Carlo simulations via Excel spreadsheet models. Although similar tools do already exist, we needed one that was simple to use for beginning students, and could be used and installed easily without system administrator privileges. We describe the design philosophy of YASAI and its features for generating random variables, identifying simulation outputs, and specifying scenarios. The output specification mechanism is novel, and the scenario generation mechanism has some novel features. An example illustrates most of YASAI's features.