19 Oct
2011
19 Oct
'11
3:27 p.m.
> Excel - well, it's the most polished
spreadsheet there's ever been.
> Other did some things better, but Excel does everything you could ever
> need.
Read the book "Laboratory Lotus : A Complete Guide To Instrument
Interfacing"; Louis M. Mezei, Prentice Hall, 1989
ISBN[10]: 0-13-519885-2
'Twould be presumptuous to specify "everything you could ever need".
Some of us have unusual needs, that you might consider bizarre.
"You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime, you get what
you need"??
On Wed, 19 Oct 2011, Tony Duell wrote:
Actually it doesn't do everything I could ever
need which leads me to a
serious qyestion :
Did/does any spreadsheet, on any platform, allow you to put complex
numbers in the cells and operate on them?
Yes, of course you can treat a complex numner as 2 real numbers and
define the appropriate operations -- any spreadsheet will do that. I did
it in Visicalc. But as I use complex numbers a lot in AC circuit
analysis, and I know others who do too, I am suprised no spreadsheet
handles them as well as my HP calculators.
I'm far from expert - I don't even know how to get Excel to TELL ME which
numbers are float, which cells (particularly floats) are calculated
fron other floats, or even which have been rounded.
I have used Visicalc, Lotus, and Excel for a number of "off-label" uses,
such as small flat-file databases, etc. A lot of my CGA and MDA monitors
had burnt-in "Lotus L"s.
It is amazingly versatile, but certainly NOT "everything that you could
ever need"
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com