Thread: Excel vs. Matlab
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Unread 18-02-2005, 16:22
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Re: Excel vs. Matlab
For me, Excel = virtual scratch pad for calculations.

I am a devout Excel user. The Visual Basic environment behind Excel (Formerly VBA) makes Excel awesome for a mechanical guy who wants to make a small custom program to run calcs, but doesn't want to write a full blown program.

I used Matlab in college in my controls classes and it was awesome for that, but I haven't used it for anything else since I have been in industry.

The other program I use is Mathcad. It is also very good. Its symbolic solver is out of this world. Robot kinematic derivations are easy to follow in Mathcad and to derive. I very often do a derivation in Mathcad and put the results in an Excel environment for rapid calculations of different scenarios.

-Paul