Numerical Recipes for MS Excel

[Foster Morrison]

I've been learning MS Excel and macro creation to analyze diesel emissions, so I have made spreadsheets that solve Kepler's equation, plot the discrete logistic, &c, as practice lessons. However, with the VBA macro language, serious scientific computing can be done and some people apparently are doing it. There already are a lot of functions in Excel that overlap NR and more are available as an "add-on" But there might be a market for NR functions and macros that could enable Excel to compete with packages such as MatLab, Mathematica, &c. Excel provides fairly good graphics capability and supports 64-bit floating point. There is at least one academic offering a tutorial on doing scientific computing in Excel. There may be some concern about how long the VBA macro language will be supported, but MS has developed a similar Visual Basic.NET Office System Tools so that the jump should be no worse than that from Fortran 77 to 90 or C++. The name of the academic and other info may be gleaned from Bill Jelen's website (he wrote the book I bought, "VBA & Macro for MS Excel", Que, 2004): http://www.mrexcel.com/index.html
The zipped discrete logistic Excel file is attached.