Excel is by far the most widely distributed numerical software in the world. Most students have it on their computers, and are already somewhat familiar with it. Moreover, it is easily learned, has quite good graphics, and contains an extensive set of scientific functions. Most importantly for the present talk, Excel is readily extended through the use of custom macros, i.e., user-provided subroutines that can be called from the spreadsheet to perform specialized functions. For all the above reasons, Excel is a good starting point for developing specialized applications for the analysis of chemical data.
During the past few years I have written a number of such macros. They are freely downloadable, and are provided in source code, so that they are readily modified by the end user. In this talk I will describe several of these macros, and some of their applications. I will also highlight their recent extension to very high precision, far beyond the (15 decimal) double precision of PC's and Macs, and give examples where such an extension is useful.
Macros downloadable from: www.bowdoin.edu/~rdelevie/excellaneous. Details described in R. de Levie, Advanced Excel for scientific data analysis, Oxford University Press 2004
Back to Symposia: Chemical Education - Computers in Chemistry
Back to The 33rd Northeast Regional Meeting (July 14-17, 2005)