I find SpeedCrunch can be very useful along side excel once you get a feel for it. Often I use SpeedCrunch's unit conversion and SI prefix features to distill a

I find SpeedCrunch can be very useful along side excel once you get a feel for it. Often I use SpeedCrunch's unit conversion and SI prefix features to distill all the magic numbers I need and double check my formula. After that, creating a formula in excell (or another language) to deal convert data in a strange format is easy. Learning SpeedCrunch is easy if you're already comfortable with single-line calculators. It has autocomplete that will help learn some of the SpeedCrunch specific units. For example, year_julian vs year_tropical, gallon_US vs gallon_UK are slightly different.