Open Thread: How are you using Excel?
Submitted by Merlin on August 22, 2006 - 2:10am.
Yesterday, I mentioned I’d been talking with someone who’s looking at interesting things people are doing with Microsoft Excel. I talked to her again yesterday, and with her official okey-dokey, I’ll virtually introduce Tralee Pearce (*waves*), a reporter from Toronto’s Globe & Mail whom you might remember from a very swell article about the Hipster PDA.
So, by request – and to help Tralee with fleshing out her fun-sounding article – I hope you all will jump in here: What kind of cool, novel, and non-obvious stuff are you doing with Excel? What’s the wildest, most obsessive, most nerdy thing you ever saw someone do with our favorite spreadsheet program?
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That was longer than I...
That was longer than I thought it was going to be.
In summary, Excel was used to generate a numerical simulation of the voltage distribution within an atypical transmission line. Because it was done in Excel, it made for a really neat graphical display of the simulation process as it worked. The simulation was concerned with cells oriented in space, and so Excel showed cells oriented on a spreadsheet in an identical way. As the nubmers in the spreadsheet cells converged to the solution to the problem, you could watch the correct voltage profile “evolve” in front of you.
Most other students used MATLAB to do the simulation. (and I should hope that student finally gave up doing simulations this way later in his career :) )