Advanced Excel for Scientific Data Analysis 303
cgjherr writes "If the recent financial meltdown has left you wondering, 'When does exponential decay function stop?' then I have the book for you. Advanced Excel for Scientific Data Analysis is the kind of book that only comes along every twenty years. A tome so densely packed with scientific and mathematical formulas that it almost dares you to try and understand it all. A "For Dummies" book starts with a gentle introduction to the technology. This is more like a "for Mentats" book. It assumes that you know Excel very well. The first chapter alone will have you in awe as you see the author turn the lowly Excel into something that rivals Mathematica using VBA, brains, and a heaping helping of fortitude." Read on for the rest of Jack's review.
When I first opened this book my mouth just dropped. It had been years since I had seen a book typeset using LaTeX. But in an instant it made sense as the book is crammed packed with the kind of equations that would have been a nightmare to build with any other tools. Chapter after chapter has everything a really smart person needs to do curve fitting, statistical measures, differential equations, time-frequency analysis. But don't expect a play by play here. You will get the equations, set within a few dense paragraphs, with maybe a spreadsheet and a chart or two to show the results.
| Advanced Excel for Scientific Data Analysis | |
| author | Robert de Levie |
| pages | 700 |
| publisher | Oxford Press |
| rating | 9 |
| reviewer | Jack Herrington |
| ISBN | 9780195370225 |
| summary | Use Excel for high end scientific data analysis akin to Mathemetica |
The first chapter concentrates on the getting the most out of Excel as a tool. All the chapters that follow dig into specific data analysis techniques. Chapters two, three and four are on least squares. Chapter five and six cover the analysis in the time domain including fourier transforms. Chapter seven covers differential equations. Chapter eight returns to Excel by digging in deeper into macros. Which leads into chapter nine, where we dig deeper into basic mathematical operations. Chapter ten covers matrix operations. And chapter eleven wraps it all up by giving you some spreadsheet best practices.
In University style there are also some exercises that you can do along the way if you want to tweak your brain pan a little more. To amuse myself I tried a few and I believe the book would have assessed my attempts 'wanting' if it had a voice to tell me.
Where most books like this would have several authors this book has just one; Roberte de Levie. This means that the tone, style and quality of the book is consistent throughout. A fact that you will come to appreciate as the book wades in ever increasingly deep data analysis concepts as the chapters roll on.
Though I would have preferred the book to have code samples in C#, I understand that the language of Excel is VBA and I guess I have to live with that. Thankfully VBA has come a long way and if you so inclined it would likely be easy to translate the code into C#, Java, or whatever else you like.
The fact that one person wrote the book left me wondering, "Who is this guy?" In my minds eye I kinda of figured he would look like one of those pulsing brain guys from Star Trek. Turns out he is a professor at Bowdoin College. And his fields of study include ionic equilibria, electrochemical kinetics, electrochemical oscillators, stochastic processes, and a whole lot more stuff that almost seems made up to sound impressive.
When this book isn't serving as an amazing reference for both Excel, scientific problem solving, or just insane equations it serves other purposes as well. It's a handy portable IQ test, as the count of pages you can grind through in one sitting, plus 90, is roughly your intelligence quotient. And if you fail at that you can always put a copy of the book, along with the Orange Bible, under your pillow and try to osmose your way to becoming the Kwisatz Haderach.
In all seriousness, this is a great book. It represents the kind of in-depth work and research we used to see in books that came out twenty years ago. Robert is to be applauded for his work. This is an excellent resource for anyone looking to do scientific data analysis but who was unaware of the powerful capabilities that Excel provides that is likely waiting just one Startup menu click away.
The book is not without fault. I would have preferred that it had been in color, or at least have one color section to show some of the more impressive visualizations that I'm sure would look great in color. In addition the index is silly short for a book that clocks in at 700 pages. But those are only minor quibbles for what is all-in-all an amazing piece of work.
You can purchase Advanced Excel for Scientific Data Analysis from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
This was the problem (Score:0, Funny)
The whole financial mess was due to the use of Excel? No wander!
Bad math (Score:3, Funny)
If the recent financial meltdown has left you wondering, 'When does exponential decay function stop?' then I have the book for you. Advanced Excel for Scientific Data Analysis
So THAT's why we had a financial meltdown. All of those investment banks were doing their books and analysis with Excel 2007.
incongruous (Score:5, Funny)
There's something hard to reconcile about the reviewer's obvious awe and the fact that the book was written by someone who thinks doing meaningful scientific data analysis in Excel is a good idea.
Spreadsheets are the right tool ... (Score:5, Funny)
You see, there is a fundamental problem in science and the problem can be summarized as this: how do you get the right results in order to optimize the grants that you receive. Spreadsheets are ideal for this purpose for two reasons. First of all, they are designed to handle financial data. This is great because financial data are what grants are all about. For example: will result X allow for a conference in Hawaii or California this year.
The other big reason to use spreadsheets is that they make data more maluable. Normal scientific tools make it difficult to micromanage the data that you acquire, partially because the people who produce that software have this mistaken notion that data has to be managed in a consistent way. So you're usually stuck doing the same thing to an entire dataset, and it's even difficult to treat different datasets in different way. But spreadsheets expose all of that data, so it is easy to tweak an observation here and a variable there to get the desired result to maximize your grant.
So you see, spreadsheets are a tremendously valueable tool for scientists. It is the best tool for the job.
Using Excel for scientific calculations (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Excel is a horrible tool (Score:2, Funny)
I don't quite understand your post. Do you have a Power Point presentation?
Anecdote about Excel (Score:3, Funny)
If you couldn't figure out Excel within those two class periods, it was recommended that you switched your major to business administration. The business administration school had a semester long class devoted to learning Excel.
Re:incongruous ...I KNEW there was a reason (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Anecdote about Excel (Score:5, Funny)
Proving that with Excel? How does that work? That's a trigonometry problem, and it follows from the definitions of the sine and cosine functions, and from Pythagoras's theorem. You do it with a pen and paper and you write 'QED' at the bottom. To prove it with Excel, you'd have to calculate the result individually for every possible angle, and unless Microsoft have released an update I haven't had yet then Excel doesn't have a transfinite number of available rows.
Oh, wait...
engineering school
That's dangerously close to reality. That's where they think that if something works the first fifty million times, then it's going to work every time.
Still, it could be worse. You could be in If you couldn't figure out Excel within those two class periods, it was recommended that you switched your major to business administration.
Yeah.
Re:incongruous (Score:2, Funny)
I would guess that OpenOffice Calc is not suitable either, although I would tend to trust it a little more than Excel simply because it's open source.
Their spec is to be bug-compatible with Excel. Though, IIRC, with optional parameters for correct behaviour.