Modelling physics with Microsoft Excel®

the long version

"The purpose of this work is to show some of the ways in which Microsoft Excel may be used to solve numerical problems in the field of physics. But why use Excel in the first place? Certainly Excel is never going to out-perform the wonderful symbolic algebra tools that we have today---Mathematica. Mathcad, Maple, MATLAB, etc. However, from a pedagogical stance Excel has the advantage of not being a 'black box' approach to problem solving. The user must do a lot more work than just call up a function. The intermediate steps in a calculation are displayed on the worksheet---of course this is not true with the Solver add-in which is a wonderful 'black box'. Another advantage is the somewhat less steep learning curve. A high school student can quickly lean how to get Excel to do useful calculations."