Product Description

Learn to fully harness the power of Microsoft Excel® to perform scientific and engineering calculations

With this text as your guide, you can significantly enhance Microsoft Excel's® capabilities to execute the calculations needed to solve a variety of chemical, biochemical, physical, engineering, biological, and medicinal problems. The text begins with two chapters that introduce you to Excel's Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language, which allows you to expand Excel's® capabilities, although you can still use the text without learning VBA. Following the author's step-by-step instructions, here are just a few of the calculations you learn to perform:

• Use worksheet functions to work with matrices
• Find roots of equations and solve systems of simultaneous equations
• Solve ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations
• Perform linear and non-linear regression
• Use random numbers and the Monte Carlo method

This text is loaded with examples ranging from very basic to highly sophisticated solutions. More than 100 end-of-chapter problems help you test and put your knowledge to practice solving real-world problems. Answers and explanatory notes for most of the problems are provided in an appendix.

The CD-ROM that accompanies this text provides several useful features:

• All the spreadsheets, charts, and VBA code needed to perform the examples from the text
• Solutions to most of the end-of-chapter problems
• An add-in workbook with more than twenty custom functions

This text does not require any background in programming, so it is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate courses. Moreover, practitioners in science and engineering will find that this guide saves hours of time by enabling them to perform most of their calculations with one familiar spreadsheet package

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123156 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Review
"I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone who finds themselves using Excel to do numerical computations beyond the basic spreadsheet operations. The CD provides a wealth of custom functions that extend the usefulness of Excel plus virtually all of the spreadsheets, charts, and VBA code needed to perform the example problems given in the text. This paperback edition and CD are a real bargain." (Technometrics, May 2008)

"This is a wonderful book for power users of Excel or those wanting to learn VBA and could also be useful as a course book in numerical methods…"" (IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine, July/August 2008)

"I am wiser now, and you should be, too! This book is strongly recommended for all engineers, scientists, undergraduate and graduate students that have ever used EXCEL." (Materials and Manufacturing Processes, Volume 22, Issue 7 2007)

"An excellent volume for practicing scientists or engineers encountering numerical methods." (CHOICE, October 2007)

From the Back Cover

Learn to fully harness the power of Microsoft Excel® to perform scientific and engineering calculations

With this text as your guide, you can significantly enhance Microsoft Excel's® capabilities to execute the calculations needed to solve a variety of chemical, biochemical, physical, engineering, biological, and medicinal problems. The text begins with two chapters that introduce you to Excel's Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language, which allows you to expand Excel's® capabilities, although you can still use the text without learning VBA. Following the author's step-by-step instructions, here are just a few of the calculations you learn to perform:

• Use worksheet functions to work with matrices

• Find roots of equations and solve systems of simultaneous equations

• Solve ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations

• Perform linear and non-linear regression

• Use random numbers and the Monte Carlo method

This text is loaded with examples ranging from very basic to highly sophisticated solutions. More than 100 end-of-chapter problems help you test and put your knowledge to practice solving real-world problems. Answers and explanatory notes for most of the problems are provided in an appendix.

The CD-ROM that accompanies this text provides several useful features:

• All the spreadsheets, charts, and VBA code needed to perform the examples from the text

• Solutions to most of the end-of-chapter problems

• An add-in workbook with more than twenty custom functions

This text does not require any background in programming, so it is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate courses. Moreover, practitioners in science and engineering will find that this guide saves hours of time by enabling them to perform most of their calculations with one familiar spreadsheet package.

About the Author
E. Joseph Billo, a former associate professor of chemistry at Boston College, is the author of Excel for Chemists: A Comprehensive Guide, Second Edition (Wiley). He has developed two short courses, "Advanced Excel for Scientists and Engineers" and "Excel Visual Basic Macros for Scientists and Engineers," which he has presented to thousands of scientists throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe for organizations such as The American Chemical Society, the National Cancer Institute, Procter & Gamble, Shell, and Texaco.

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Customer Reviews

Excellent Book on Excel VBA Programming
My library holds many books on using Excel and programming in Excel VBA. Billo's book has brought valuable hints and techniques that have enhanced my VBA programming skills. The book offers a well balanced coverage of numerical analysis and statistical regression topics. While the examples are more geared for the chemists, they should not be a turn off for readers who are in other scientific and engineering disciplines.

Billo offers an interesting approach to using VBA code and shows you, throughout the book, how to write functions (in modules) that you can use as "custom functions" in your spreadsheets. Excel invokes these functions automatically whenever you alter a cell value and trigger automatic recalculations. This technique frees you from having to repeatedly invoke VBA macros to recalculate values in a spreadsheet. The "custom functions" you learn to build become a custom extension to the Excel library of built-in functions.

I highly recommend this fine book and congratulate the author on his clever work. Billo's book stands out among other Excel VBA books.

This book is the REAL DEAL......
Excel for Scientists and Engineers: Numerical Methods
I am very pleased with my purchase of this book. This book is the REAL DEAL.....if you are looking to do advanced numerical math with an Excel spreadsheet. Many other "Excel books for Scientists" simply offer elementary methods on error detection, lists of items and simple math like rounding off, etc. This book is completely different. It starts of on doing matrices with Excel, then goes through Interpolation, differentiation, Integration, Simultaneos Equations, Partial Differential equations, then finishes off with both Linear as well as Non-Linear Regression techniques and Curve Fitting.

In and of itself, even if it didn't show methods to do these things with an Excel spreadsheet, the book would be well worth the read simply as a refresher course in these topics. However, it does show lucid, well-thought out examples of implementing complex numerical methods with standard Excel spreadsheets.

The only thing that this book is lacking in, is a coverage of normal level usage of VBA. It does start off in the very first few chapters with a cursory coverage of VBA, but that is pretty much all that we hear of VBA throughout the rest of the book. However, this is not too much of a drawback, because there are many volumes of other books which cover VBA in wonderful detail. What would be a marriage made in Heaven would be this book with more step-by-step integration with VBA, showing advanced programming techniques in Excel with regards to the great coverage of numerical methods.

The average dropper
I am a bit impatient. I bought Billo's book, Bourg/O'Reilly's, and Verschuuren's all at the same time.Being impatient I immediately jumped into regression analysis in Billo's book. Got lost and nothing worked.. I pulled up Bourg/O'Reilly...They published a "cookbook". I figured all I had to do was find the recipe and I was home free. I found the recipe but still couldn't work it. I picked up Verschuuren and "Voila" the curtain was lifted and now I am a pretty good programmer in Visual Basic. It is conceivable that someone with more programming experience than I might greatly profit from Billo and/or Bourg/O'Reilly......but buy a copy of Verschuuen......just in case.