How To's > Work with Dynamic Parameters (Sliders) > Use a Slider to Compute Things Based on a Collection

Use a Slider to Compute Things Based on a Collection

There are times when you want measures computed for a collection to be accessible throughout the document. For example, suppose you have measured the weights of a bunch of butterfly cocoons, and you want the mean and standard deviation of those weights to be used to generate simulated weights from a normal distribution. You can use sliders to calculate the values you need and then refer to those sliders in any formula in the document.

Here's how:

1. Drag the name of the collection from the collection to the slider and release.

The slider will acquire a thick black border indicating that you can drop there.

2. Choose Edit | Edit Formula.

3. Enter a formula that refers to an attribute in the collection, such as mean(weight).

4. Edit the slider name to reflect its use.

Now you can refer to this slider in other situations. For example, in a dot plot of simulated cocoon weights, you could plot values to compare the actual mean cocoon weight with the mean of the simulated weights.


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