Excel for Scientists and Engineers: Numerical Methods

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0471387347 ISBN 13: 9780471387343

Publisher: Wiley-Interscience, 2007

Learn to fully harness the power of Microsoft Excel(r) to perform scientific and engineering calculations

With this text as your guide, you can significantly enhance Microsoft Excel's(r) capabilities to execute the calculations needed to solve a variety of chemical, biochemical, physical, engineering, biological, and medicinal problems. The text begins with two chapters that introduce you to Excel's Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language, which allows you to expand Excel's(r) capabilities, although you can still use the text without learning VBA. Following the author's step-by-step instructions, here are just a few of the calculations you learn to perform:
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Use worksheet functions to work with matrices
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Find roots of equations and solve systems of simultaneous equations
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Solve ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations
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Perform linear and non-linear regression
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Use random numbers and the Monte Carlo method

This text is loaded with examples ranging from very basic to highly sophisticated solutions. More than 100 end-of-chapter problems help you test and put your knowledge to practice solving real-world problems. Answers and explanatory notes for most of the problems are provided in an appendix.

The CD-ROM that accompanies this text provides several useful features:
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All the spreadsheets, charts, and VBA code needed to perform the examples from the text
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Solutions to most of the end-of-chapter problems
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An add-in workbook with more than twenty custom functions

This text does not require any background in programming, so it is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate courses. Moreover, practitioners in science and engineering will find that this guide saves hours of time by enabling them to perform most of their calculations with one familiar spreadsheet package.

About the Author:

E. Joseph Billo, a former associate professor of chemistry at Boston College, is the author of Excel for Chemists: A Comprehensive Guide, Second Edition (Wiley). He has developed two short courses, "Advanced Excel for Scientists and Engineers" and "Excel Visual Basic Macros for Scientists and Engineers," which he has presented to thousands of scientists throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe for organizations such as The American Chemical Society, the National Cancer Institute, Procter & Gamble, Shell, and Texaco.

Review:

"I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone who finds themselves using Excel to do numerical computations beyond the basic spreadsheet operations. The CD provides a wealth of custom functions that extend the usefulness of Excel plus virtually all of the spreadsheets, charts, and VBA code needed to perform the example problems given in the text. This paperback edition and CD are a real bargain." (Technometrics, May 2008)

"This is a wonderful book for power users of Excel or those wanting to learn VBA and could also be useful as a course book in numerical methods..."" (IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine, July/August 2008)

"I am wiser now, and you should be, too! This book is strongly recommended for all engineers, scientists, undergraduate and graduate students that have ever used EXCEL." (Materials and Manufacturing Processes, Volume 22, Issue 7 2007)

"An excellent volume for practicing scientists or engineers encountering numerical methods." (CHOICE, October 2007)