Excel vs. Matlab

[Nikhil Bajaj]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

RIT just switched the mechanical engineering curriculum from teaching Excel with VBA to Matlab.

I'm proficient in both, and I choose excel for easy, short things (less then a few hours of work) and matlab for more complicated number crunching or programming.

At Purdue last semester we used both in ENGR 116, which is the Honors Engineering Computer Problem Solving Tools thing class (I really don't remember the actual name) but I found that they were both extremely useful. In practice, we used excel to do some pretty sophisticated modelling of arm torque, which could have just as easily been done in MATLAB. Our drive calculations (insert shameless plug here for you to go look at our drivetrain pic for this year) were done in Excel, mainly, to combine motors and stuff, but I'm currently working on a Matlab script that will be handy for gearbox construction.

I think they're both darn awesome.