there are many things excel can do and it does a pretty good job at even though it is designed around being a financial piece of software. for instance it has some decent column picking capabilities and does regression (can even get it to spit out some sheet calculations on many types of functions by modifing the x column(s) you choose for it). so people use it for scientific data analysis. myself included.
but it has some definate shortfalls that a good piece of scientific software would fix. for instance the ability to pick peaks out of a spectrum would be nice. also nice would be if you could enter data in min.sec and have it convert to seconds for analysis purposes. you can get excel to do these things but it takes some fanangling.
there is probably a better program out there to do scientific analysis but tradition, familiarity, and the fact that many people already have excel because they buy ms office means that excel will probably stay in the scientific toolbox for a long time to come.
1 comment:
I think much fo the power in excel is the vbscripting in the back end. unfortunatly, this is not commonly taught, so the logical extisions that each indsutry needs are only created by the leaders in the industry. soooo.... unless you want to buy and learn matlab, learn VB =) I'm too lazy, but I imagine this is the solution MS intended.
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