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

Something else

[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.

Scientific Spreadsheets

[Dymaxion]

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.

Matlab

[clark625]

A previous poster correctly stated that if you can't do it easily in a spreadsheet, you're probably needing another tool altogether. I would suggest using Matlab. Mathematica is nice, and so is Maple. And fortran's great if you want to push around bits, although C is used more by the engineering community.

Matlab's greatest strength is that it works magic with matricies. By using a spreadsheet, you aren't terribly far off from Matlab's strength, as I'm guessing that you've got several arrays. The matlab engine is also very robust and has nearly as many options available as fortran or C would. Can't beat that.

MathCad

[sysadmn]

Consider MathCad. Back when I was doing control theory classes, the interface seemed much more intuitive. You 'wrote' a page of equations, plots, etc. and they were solved automatically. You could even write live reports. It was great for lab and homework writeups. The screenshots don't do it justice. Sadly it is not free, and is windows only.

Re:What don't they handle well?

[dutky]

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.

Re:Spreadsheets

[topham]

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