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Originally Posted by sanddrag
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That's what I did, but most of the ones I found had little problems. I didn't like the orientation of the numbers, the margins weren't the correct size, lines were too light or too thick, strange non-round number of squares... One of my graphs needed 3-cycle paper, the other need 4-cycle. Just a bunch of little things that made it hard to find something that would make a clean graph to put in my otherwise neat, computer generated report.
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Originally Posted by sanddrag
For everyone: Did you know excel can plot on a logrithmic scale? Also, did you know you can do a best fit line? I never knew these things before so that's why I'm telling.
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I actually learned about that stuff in class. The first half of my Intro to Engineering class was about Excel. You never learn to truely loath a program until you're forced to spend 3 hours at a time with it.
The other example I wanted to bring up before I was rudely interupted by the beckon of class was a project I recently did. For Thermodynamics, we had to analyze certain aspects of a steam turbine. Needless to say, this takes an ungodly number of calculations. In addition to that, we had to perform the analysis for 6 different cases. After figuring out exactly what needed to be done, it probably would have taken about half an hour to manually (calculator allowed, but no computer) do the calculations for each case. My group got smart and decided to make Excel do the grunt work for us. Another group wasn't so smart. I suppose they are very adept at operating their caculators now. After finally analyzing the numbers we got, we realized there was something seriously wrong. You normally don't expect a turbine to have an isentropic efficiency of 0.45%. After about an hour and a half of triple checking all our formulas, we discovered that one of our conversion factors was wrong. With Excel, you change the number and everything fixes itself. By hand, you start over and sleep later.