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Spreadsheets for Scientific Computing?

Posted by Cliff on from the tables-on-steroids dept.

redcliffe asks: "Sometimes it's much easier to create a spreadsheet to do some mathematical calculations for physics than to create a whole new program to do the calculations. It's also handy to be able to easily change one figure and have all your other calculations update. But there a certain types of calculations that normal spreadsheet apps like KSpread don't seem to handle well. Anyone know of a spreadsheet or something similiar designed for scientific computing? I've seen GNU Octave, but that's almost like writing a whole program, and without a GUI it's hard to learn quickly."

4 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Scientific Spreadsheets by Dymaxion · · Score: 3, Informative

    You want a program like Origin -- a spreadsheet designed for scientific computing. While it's both very much not free and windows only, sometimes you just have to use the right tools for the job. A free or even just Un*x friendly replacement for Origin at its level of sophistication would be a very Good Thing. I'm hoping that there are other, similar software packages out there, but that's the one I'm most familiar with.

    1. Re:Scientific Spreadsheets by fxj · · Score: 2, Informative

      There is Scigraphica (scigraphica.sourceforge.net)
      which might be what you want. It features spreadsheets, graphics and python as programming language. Another good spreadsheet is VisAD (www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/visad.html) which is written in java and jython and thus works on Linux AND M$-windoze.

  2. Re:What don't they handle well? by dutky · · Score: 3, Informative
    OldMiner wrote
    I'm sure there are things which spreadsheets can't handle well. Off the type of my head I can think of derivatives, integration, and solving simultaneous equations.
    Huh? None of the things you mentioned are handled badly by a spreadsheet, at least not in the numerical sense. Integration is simply a sum of cell data. Derivation is obtained by taking the difference of adjacent cells. While solution of linear systems is a bit trickier, many spreadsheet packages either come with solver engines or have scripting langauges in which a simple solver can be written.

    The one thing that I have found lacking in most spreadsheets is an easy way to fit curves to data sets. This is pretty glaring omission, given that you have both the data sets and a graphing tool in most spreadsheets. But then, I suppose that curve fitting is an alien concept to most of the financial world (though, I would think, statisticians might have some use for it).

    A quick browse, however, through the Gnumeric Manual indicates that it has a linear solver and a host of statistical tools, which should allow you build almost any other numerical analysis tool you want.

    Now, if you want to get symbolic results from a spreadsheet, you are probably screwed. But there are other tools that are better suited to such tasks than spreadsheets.

  3. Re:Spreadsheets by topham · · Score: 3, Informative

    The limit of 32,000 rows was removed. Just don't get me started at how it handles CSV files by default...