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.
Wrong tool for the job (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wrong Tool (Score:3, Informative)
Spreadsheets are not the right tool (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I have not read the book (Score:3, Informative)
The company that developed the equation editor (MS licenses a neutered version of it for Office) does have a full-blown version available...
Re:I have not read the book (Score:3, Informative)
It may be close now in output quality, but any search, point and click system will always be inferior to LaTeX when it comes to equations.
Re:eh? (Score:5, Informative)
If you're going to mention that the Office costs $150 for a student version, you might as well mention that Mathematica's student version (identical to the full version, except for a banner upon printing) is $140.
Re:eh? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, and as for sharing w/ people who don't have Mathematica, that's what the free Mathematica Readers are for.
Excel *could* replace SPSS (not Mathematica) (Score:4, Informative)
SPSS has now become the standard data analysis package for quantitative studies in social sciences. It's very crappy software, and it wouldn't take a whole lot of augmentation to get Excel do what SPSS does.
The problem is that social scientists don't want to mess with the internals too much, and SPSS made for them a point and click interface - in effect, they out-Microsofted Microsoft. They charge an insulting $1500/copy and completely dominate the universities, so they're making good money.
They seriously need some competition.
Re:alternately.... kind of begs the question... (Score:5, Informative)
What in the world are you talking about? :)
LaTeX is a markup language. You can express math with it, but it doesn't do anything for you in terms of analysis.
Excel is good for small data sets and quick looks at stuff - but painful to develop in.
Mathematica requires college-level calculus and linear algebra... not PhD stuff by any stretch.
Anyway, you left out Matlab - which is pretty awesome. Depending on what you are doing, there is also R, Maple, Minitab, MathCAD, yada, yada, yada. Lately I've been doing stuff in Python... SAGE is pretty nifty, and the NumPy/SciPy stuff is coming along well (it is included in SAGE).
comparison of Mathematica and Excel VBA .. (Score:5, Informative)
"Excel 2007, like its predecessors, fails a standard set of intermediate-level accuracy tests [mathforum.org] in three areas: statistical distributions, random number generation, and estimation"
Re:alternately.... kind of begs the question... (Score:4, Informative)
Excel for Scientists and Engineers (Score:2, Informative)
Another book in the same line is E. Joseph Billo's "Excel for Scientists and Engineers," Wiley-Interscience, 2007 ISBN 978-0-471-38734-3, including CD.
You may or may not agree with using Excel, but if you do, this book will help with roots of real and imaginary equations, ordinary and partial differential equations, matrices, and statistics.
Sometimes you just don't have the luxury of using Matlab, Spotfire, etc.
Re:Bad math (Score:2, Informative)
Speaking as a wageslave in the Financial Industry: Yes, excel is the standard. For accounting. For modelling. For almost everything.
It scares me. Deeply.
Re:eh? (Score:3, Informative)
Although you don't have to be a student to use the Home and Student edition, keep in mind that it is not licensed for commercial use of any kind, including non-profits.
yup, already pointed that out in another post that if you want to use it for commercial use, you have to step up to the standard version for $240. point still stands w/ regards to mathematica at $2500 though.
How do you know if a book was typeset using LaTeX? (Score:5, Informative)
> It had been years since I had seen a book typeset using LaTeX.
The publishing industry (including my company) typesets books using LaTeX all the time. The reason you don't notice it (apart from the superior quality) is that it does its job of typesetting very well.
If this book has been typeset using LaTeX then I'm a Dutchman, or something has gone very wrong (and I'd like the author to contact me to let me know what).
Perhaps he was given faulty fonts, perhaps he was using a badly-written publisher's style, or perhaps he -- or his editor -- spent a long time making it look as bad as possible. Maybe OUP had it completely re-typeset in some other system without telling him. There are at least a dozen typographic faults in one paragraph alone, from unnecessary hyphenation to excessive word-spacing to bad math spacing, and LaTeX simply doesn't make those types of mistake unless you work very hard to introduce them manually.
As a test I screenshot a random paragraph [silmaril.ie] that I viewed in Amazon's "Look Inside" feature, and then retyped it in LaTeX [silmaril.ie] and typeset it (PDF [silmaril.ie]).
As I don't have the book (and wouldn't understand it anyway :-) I'd be interested to know where the information came from that it was typeset with LaTeX; and if it really was done in LaTeX, I'd love to know WTF kind of style files, fonts, and preamble were used.
Re:alternately.... (Score:2, Informative)