?
I do agree, it is easy to use (except programing 
)
We have got only one licence so it was easier to create excel spreadsheet.
Coming back to the program I have attached - does anybody has got similar program so I can work it out how it works
Thanks
Marcin
I do agree, it is easy to use (except programing
I think I can say with a high degree of confidence that programming that in Excel is going to be much harder than programming it in Mathcad. Excel was designed for doing simple arithmetic on tables of numbers. For that, it's very good. For complex engineering calculations, IMHO it's grossly inadequate.
R is a matrix, with the elements defined as shown. The ORIGIN for the worksheet has obviously been set to 1, so BCD with the subscript 1 refers to the first element of BCD. The T on the matrix means transpose, so the columns and rows are switched.
Then the program just loops to calculate three results.
For the calculation of tau, <i> is the column operator, so it's taking the ith column of R. The summations should be clear enough, except that in the denominator that arrow means vectorize, so the calculation is done element by element (so it's the sum of 1 over each element of R)
The root function finds the value of x where the expression shown crosses zero.
The final expression that calculates the value of f should be clear enough.
I have no idea how to implement the functions K and E in Excel. You can create a function in Excel by programming it using VBA. How to implement the numerical integration in VBA though?
Richard Jackson wrote:
I do agree, it is easy to use (except programingI think I can say with a high degree of confidence that programming that in Excel is going to be much harder than programming it in Mathcad. Excel was designed for doing simple arithmetic on tables of numbers. For that, it's very good. For complex engineering calculations, IMHO it's grossly inadequate.
Seconded. ... Thirded, Fourthed, etced.
However, I've come across this argument many times. The arguments always seems to run around the fact that "everybody has Excel", often ignoring the fact that Excel is not free (but that's kind of a red herring as there are uses for Excel and it's probably cheaper overall (purchase cost, support costs, maintainability) to get the whole Office package for everybody). However, it is likely to be significantly cheaper in both cost and timescale to get a set of floating Mathcad licences when faced with situations like this - the time spent in doing the conversion and validating it (not to mention any QA and configuration control overheads) may well exceed the cost of a Mathcad licence. Modification, re-use etc will also be significantly easier.
I have no idea how to implement the functions K and E in Excel. You can create a function in Excel by programming it using VBA. How to implement the numerical integration in VBA though?
They could be also be implemented using normal spreadsheet techniques to perform a basic numerical integration (see bottom of attached worksheet for a crude (non-spreadsheet) example of the technique using the midpoint rule).
Stuart
