My Excel to the rescue story is the time I worked in a locked down environment with limited access to programming tools but needed to make physics-based simulat

My Excel to the rescue story is the time I worked in a locked down environment with limited access to programming tools but needed to make physics-based simulators. I made an aircraft flight model that made heat maps of line of sight vectors to the ground as a plane banked and flew its looping flight path over a city. I included an overhead view animation tab by plotting the lat/lon over a scatter plot with a map as a background image and walking over each point via the arrow keys. Wrote some VB to output the image frame to files then stitched them together as a gif. Funny enough it worked great on everyone’s machine except the conference room computer attached to the projector. Turns out it was due to it not having a printer driver installed so some screen inch to pixels system variable wasn’t set. I did all of the problems in the Fundamentals of Astro dynamics book (BMW) via excel by using the cel copy via mouse drag to perform iteration based calculations. A co-worker made a complete battlefield simulation in excel that was amazing. Another shrunk the row and columns cells into pixel size and made some pretty cool looking animations by using cell formatting to turn them on/off with color. Today, the only modern toolset that would come close to being able to made those examples as quickly would be Jupyter Notebooks. Another tool “professional” coders hate. Maybe Matlab with some costly modules but that breaks down once you leave its linear algebra comfort zone. I truly hate Microsoft but Excel is an amazing piece of software. Which funny enough started on a Mac.