by Bernard V. Liengme (Author)
This book demonstrates some of the ways in which Microsoft Excel(R) may be used to solve numerical problems in the field of physics. But why use Excel in the first place? Certainly, Excel is never going to out-perform the wonderful symbolic algebra tools that we have today - Mathematica, Mathcad, Maple, MATLAB, etc. However, from a pedagogical stance, Excel has the advantage of not being a 'black box' approach to problem solving. The user must do a lot more work than just call up a function. The intermediate steps in a calculation are displayed on the worksheet. Another advantage is the somewhat less steep learning curve. This book shows Excel in action in various areas within physics. Some Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) has been introduced, the purpose here is to show how the power of Excel can be greatly extended and hopefully to whet the appetite of a few readers to get familiar with the power of VBA. Those with programming experience in any other language should be able to follow the code.
Author Biography
Bernard V Liengme attended Imperial College London for his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees; he held post-doctoral fellowships at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of British Columbia. He has conducted extensive research in surface chemistry and the Mossbauer effect. He has been at St Francis Xavier University in Canada since 1968 as a Professor, Associate Dean and Registrar, as well as teaching chemistry and computer science. He currently lectures part-time on business information systems. Bernard is also the author of other successful books: COBOL by Command (1996), A Guide to Microsoft Excel for Scientists and Engineers (now in its 4th edition) and A Guide to Microsoft Excel for Business and Management (now in its 2nd edition).