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."

Comments

Spreadsheets

[Associate]

I usually run into the problem where spreadsheet software just isn't powerful enough to handle the amount of data I want. But, the problem ends up being too time consuming to write a whole Access or some other db for. The result is Excel files several MB long.

Excel

[SpatchMonkey]

Just use Excel. The development time is quicker and faster than building a database in Oracle or Foxpro or whatever. Just use a spreadsheet row for each row in your table and reimplement all the useful functions like SUM(), COUNT(), INSERT, WITH UPDLOCK etc in Visual Basic. If it gets corrupted just hire some cheap data entry people to type it all in again.

What could be easier?

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[bellings]

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