3 ms·
My girlfriend uses a spreadsheet for her engineering work. She constantly complains about Excel running out of memory and crashing, and her work won't authorize
by caw 12y ago
My girlfriend uses a spreadsheet for her engineering work. She constantly complains about Excel running out of memory and crashing, and her work won't authorize the 64 bit version.
Basically she's importing time series data from sensors around the production plant, and then doing fairly complex engineering calculations. All of the formulas are pretty much textbook or derivation/substitutions thereof (e.g. different units, etc), but it's really crazy seeing them written as single line Excel expressions. She spends hours debugging single expression errors in the formulas written by herself and other engineers.
Since you asked for 2 examples, I used a spreadsheet for hosting cost estimation.
- tedchs 12y agoHave you suggested R?
- caw 12y agoI thought R was for statistics and not for mass balance equations. Graphing does seem plausible, that's sometimes what she does at the end. EDIT: Even if she got it installed she'd have to the whole team to install it as well because they share data by emailing the spreadsheets.
- tedchs 12y agoR is for stats and data analysis in general. Should be able to do the same numeric computation that Excel can do. If there is not a hard requirement for the data to be on-site, have you seen Google BigQuery and Fusion Tables? https://cloud.google.com/products/bigquery/ https://cloud.google.com/products/bigquery/ https://sites.google.com/site/fusiontablestalks/stories https://sites.google.com/site/fusiontablestalks/stories