Spreadsheets for Scientific Computing?

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."

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[Goldsmith]

Spreadsheets are usefull, yes, but if you're trying to do something your spreadsheet can't handle, chances are you should probably not be using it.

I suggest you use a program like Mathmatica, or program in Fortran or similar "easy" programming language. Spreadsheets are really only usefull in physics for data collection and mining on a small scale.