The simplest way to set a file parameter is to type its value straight into the entry box beside its caption in the file parameter dialogue. For single values, this is the only way to enter them initially. The tick button replaces the currently saved value with what has been typed in, while the cross button reverts the entry field to the saved value.

The Table Data dialogue is used to specify how to extract data from a file of any one of a number of formats so that it can be used in a Simile component. Its main use is for getting data for file parameters, but it also appears when creating a table function that is built into a component's equation.

There are four tabs in the dialogue, corresponding to the four varieties of supported data format. These are:

The File Parameter dialogue allows the modeller to specify where every parameter in the model gets its values from. It contains an entry box for each parameter, which displays the values associated with it, and when you hover over it it pops up information about where those values come from. Hovering over the parameter captions, listed to the left of the entry fields, displays the units and dimensions of the required data. Simple values can be typed in directly, while long lists can be loaded from data files.

Submodels with one instance per data record

It may be that you want to run your model with many different datasets, and these datasets each have different numbers of records which are supposed to correspond to instances of a submodel. Or perhaps you have nested submodels, where the membership of the inner submodel is different in each instance of the outer submodel, with the actual memberships being determined by the numbering of data records in a file.

Polygon diagram

This tool enables a dataset to be displayed as the colours of polygonal areas on a map. It can be used either where vector data for an actual map is available (either in the model, or in a separate file), or where an area is represented as some regular set of shapes whose vertices can be calculated by the model, e.g. hexagonal tiling.

The context menu (also known as the edit menu) can be invoked for the desktop, or for the contents of a submodel. The actions in the context menu apply only to the submodel for which it was invoked. To invoke the context menu for a submodel, either:

• Right-click in the background of the submodel while in pointer mode, or
• Click o the "Edit" item in the menu bar of a window that has been opened to display the contents of that submodel.

The context menu contains the following entries:

Statistical functions produce variates from distributions, and generally produce different values at each point in the model where they are called.

There are up to three forms of each statistical function:

Model properties

List handling