Overview of Frequently asked questions
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General
- How much does MIX 2.0 cost?
- How long will the student, academic, and personal licenses be valid?
- Are updates free?
- Activation fails or takes a long time. What's going on?
- Does MIX 2.0 work with Excel 2010?
- Is there a maximum number of studies in a custom dataset?
- Can MIX 2.0 be used instead of existing programs like RevMan or CMA?
- There is currently no help system in MIX 2.0. How do I learn how to use MIX 2.0?
Using MIX 2.0 Pro
General FAQs
MIX 2.0 comes in two flavors. A Lite version and a Professional version. The Lite version will be free for everyone and can be used to analyze the built-in data sets (without a time limit). If you want to to analyze your own data sets, you will need the professional version. The Pro versions costs between $75 and $210, depending on the license. For more detailed information, see the licenses page.
How long will the student, academic, and personal licenses be valid?
The licenses for MIX 2.0 Pro are valid to use MIX 2.0 indefinitely.
Yes, all updates of functionality described as part of MIX 2.0 on the features page are free.
The Windows firewall as well as other commercial firewalls can prevent MIX 2.0 from connecting to the MIX activation server. This will result in an activation error and your software will not be activated. To solve this issue, temporarily disable your firewall. Alternatively, you can go into the firewall settings and enable all connection permissions for Microsoft Excel for the network location ('Home', 'Work', or 'Public') that is active.
Some FTP programs can interfere with Excel's direct contact with a server. We have had reports of activation failing when CoreFTP was installed and set to handle all FTP communication automatically.
Alternatively, you may have entered the wrong license code or you may have used up the number of activations with your license.
Yes and No. MIX 2.0 works with Excel 2010 for the most part. However, at the time of writing this explanation, Excel 2010 is still in beta and has not yet been officially released. The current beta-version of Excel 2010 contains a number of bugs and one of them prevents MIX 2.0 from creating graphs in the user's active Excel sheet. Hopefully Microsoft will have fixed this in the public version of Excel 2010.
FAQs on using MIX 2.0 Pro
The quick answer is 'no'. The long asnwer is that you can enter as many studies as you can use rows in Excel 2007, minus 1. This is 1,048,575 studies, more than you will ever have studies in your meta-analysis...
Can MIX 2.0 be used instead of existing programs like RevMan or CMA?
Yes and no. Yes, MIX 2.0 can do many of the analyses that you find in other meta-analysis software (and even more). It is particularly versatile from a graphical viewpoint. However, MIX 2.0 focuses on numerical and graphical meta-analysis; it does not manage reviews like RevMan and will not do so in future versions either.
There is no help system in MIX 2.0. How do I learn how to use the program?
MIX 2.0 Lite and MIX 2.0 Pro currently do not have a HTML help system built into the program. However, the help that you can get from MIX 2.0 to learn about the program and about meta-analysis is extensive. First of all, you can start up the Metatutor inside MIX 2.0 Lite and MIX 2.0 Pro. The Metatutor will give you 'live' comments about the analysis you are performing. In addition, we are preparing a Learning Center on this website. In the Learning Center you will be able to access many tutorials about how to use MIX 2.0 Lite and MIX 2.0 Pro. Finally, check these FAQ pages regularly as we will update them when get the same question from different people.
We are also working on a textbook about meta-analysis that uses MIX, though this will not be out until the end of 2010.
Questions that are not answered above
If you have questions that are not included in the FAQ above, do not hesitate to If your question concerns program errors, please provide us with information on your operating system (Windows XP, Vista, etc. including the service pack number) and the update serial of your Excel (found by clicking on the Office orb > Excel Options > Resources > About), for instance "Microsoft Excel 2007 (12.0.6504.5001) SP2 MSO (12.0.6425.1000)".