I recently started to realize that Excel is a powerful tool that can solve many problems. What interesting mathematics problems are there can be solved using excel? I am looking for a set of challenges to try and solve using excel and to try and gain a better understanding of excel while having fun (problem solving).
Questions that can be solved using Excel.
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0I use it all the time as an alternative to a programming language. As long as I won't loop more than about 2000 times, seeing every number in a calculation makes debugging fast. When people ask recursion questions, I always calculate the first terms to see what they look like. – 2012-12-21
2 Answers
There are many books (including free e-books) on the matter.
Here is a scattering of book examples (spreadsheets can do many amazing things and one of my instructors used it in numerical analysis and it was amazing to see, especially since I am more a Mathematica person).
Practical Numerical Analysis using Microsoft Excel, by A. Nandy
Applied Calculus with Microsoft Excel, Chester Piascik
Applied Mathematics with Microsoft Excel, Chester Piasci
Introductory Econometrics: Using Monte Carlo Simulation with Microsoft Excel, Humberto Barreto, Frank Howland
Data Analysis and Decision Making with Microsoft Excel: With Decision Tools and Statistic Tools Suite, S. Christian Albright, Wayne L. Winston, Christopher James Zappe
Statistics with Microsoft Excel (5th Edition), Beverly Dretzke
Finance and Financial Engineering with Microsoft Excel, Vikram Nanda
Excel by Example: A Microsoft Excel Cookbook for Electronics Engineers, Aubrey Kagan
Excel for Scientists and Engineers: Numerical Methods, E. Joseph Billo
Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)), David M Bourg
Additionally, there are interesting tools for things like simulations, risk analyses, optimization and the like that are add-ons, for example Excel Solver. Look at a list of examples.
Regards -A
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0I have been amazed by some of the things I have seen peop$l$e at $w$ork and numerical analysts do with a spreadsheet. At work, some extremely complex math and engineering tools have been developed. One of MicroS's best tools IMO. – 2013-05-11
Here are some mentions of Excel related to data science.
http://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic-gettingStarted/details/getting-started-with-excel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwt6XEh7U3g
However, to do these kind of problems right, one probably will need more than Excel.
You could use Excel to analyze and visual your personal finances (or any recurring numbers of have). Make some conditional formatting where you spend more or less than average. Make some simple prediction for the future etc. Make a monthly predicted overall...