From: Doug Jones (random@qnet.com)
Date: Tue Sep 12 2000 - 09:15:21 MDT
Emlyn O'Regan wrote:
>
> Spike wrote:
> >
> > {8^D I have heard rumors that Bill's Bloatware is planning to release
> > an industrial strength version of excel that has a capacity of a megaline.
> > Anyone else heard of that? spike
> >
>
> Geez Spike, what is it with excel & engineers? Some years back I used to
> work in a company with lots of engineers, supporting small systems.
> Engineers, I discovered, love excel. At some point, the really keen ones
> discover Excel macros, and build systems, which grow until they become both
> mission critical and entirely broken. That was a, ah, challenging job.
Well, when you have to calculate a design with many inputs and outputs,
few other tools work as well. For instance, for rocket engines I put in
the a typical chamber pressure, throat density and sonic speed, and Isp
generated by a chemical kinetics calculator... chamber dimensions are a
reult, then cerain injector parameters must be selected from a table of
standard sizes, with consideration of combustion stability issues. This
spreadsheet is only about 50k and just a few sheets.
The insidious thing about Excel is that is can be (somewhat creakily) be
used to analyze test data, with thousands of rows and tens of columns.
These files quickly balloon up and often have ugly on-the-fly
statistical calculations, too. This is the camel's nose in the tent,
but engineers are laoth to learn a new tools when a familiar one will
suffice.
> Truly Spike, I say unto ye, venture into the world of MSAccess. You'll be
> surprised; contrary to the hype, it's actually a really useful tool for
> storing/manipulating large amounts of data. Just don't try to build
> multiuser systems out of it.
I'll have to look into this for data crunching- sigh.
-- Doug Jones Rocket Plumber, XCOR Aerospace http://www.xcor-aerospace.com
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