Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a fairly powerful package now, especially with the possiblity to include macros in files. I had developed a fluid flow solver for pipeline in excel which was fairly neat since it gave the information that the engineer needed and could look at very efficiently. The great thing is that the macros were only used to do a series of steps, but the number crunching was done within cells itself. This was very useful to the engineer that wanted to see intermediate numbers and not just the final result all the time.

The most powerful thing that a user can do to make Excel more reliable is to name cells. Naming cells allows the user to give certain cells absolute names, that was when you need to refer back to them, you don't have to recall that the cell is C23 on sheet4. It's possible to name the cell as let's say "density" and now whenever you want to used that number in a formula is you just type "density" rather than trying to remember the reference for the cell. This maybe slightly more time consuming than than just using the mouse to point to the correct cell, but the naming convention will allow you to make that an absolute reference to that cell as well as improving readablilty of the equation when you open the document up a month later. (Oh yeah, that's what that equation means)

The second thing that a user can do to improve the usage of Excel is use the if statement to give directions to a condition. This is not as elegant as in programming languages, but it's rather useful to do this to define other cells that use different numbers based on a condition, such as fluid flow being laminar or turbulent. You can point the value of a cell to a different location rather than having to manually assign the equation everytime.

Once again, if there is some specific package that you want information on please email me your request and I will do my best to point you in the right direction.