I'm trying to fathom why anyone would think the use of Excel would be a requirement in any engineering course..
On the other hand, someone getting an associates degree to be an administrative assistant (erm, secretary), sure, lots of Excel and Word and PowerPoint. And how to make coffee and order Chinese.
I'd be kind of worried if we hired an engineer or engineering intern who didn't know their way around Excel.
Either they've got a freaky brain, or else they're not going to be terribly efficient at their job, at least where I work.
Excel is in the same "pry it from my cold, dead fingers" category as my TI-89 calculator.
I thought I had a grasp on the basics but my eyes were opened some time in the first week when they told me the difference between clicking and dragging.
I'm glad I didn't skip it.
Did you ever try the really advanced shit, like
middle click? You think it's impossible and you'll never get the hang of it, but goddamn it's amazing to see it in action.
not in IT but we get both ends of the spectrum here, the people who don't know shit about anything and the people who need to take a step back from tech,
the 2nd group are the ones that get pissed off at corp America when they realize we are stuck in the past decade, your work comp is prob a hand-me down from Dell or HP, you have to use IE and your USB ports may well be disabled
also get used to that 19" monitor because that's all you get
Ouch.
I had a crappy computer for awhile. (It
was high-end, 8 years before I got it.)
After enough complaining about it, the department manager had IT build me something worthy of Mordor.
I helped pick some components. For awhile, it was quite bit faster than my PC at home. I never thought I'd see
that happen. Oh, and IT lets
some of us have admin-level rights. :awe: I can actually
use the computer! Imagine that. A system that's locked-down, set to nothing but defaults, is like outfitting a surgeon with mittens and safety scissors, crippling an otherwise useful tool.
My wife and I are both chemical engineers. Both of us have Excel open at work pretty much 100% of the time.
I tend to use it more for data crunching / analysis and she uses it more for budgets and communications with vendors. But still, Excel is probably our most important tool.
Sure I have used Mathcad, Maple, Fluent, Wolfram Alpha, Prism, and my own custom codes in C, C++, C#, VB.NET, VB6 to do my math. But, it is Excel that keeps bringing me back due to its being pretty powerful and quick. The solver feature on Excel is probably an Engineer's best friend. Sadly, Microsoft buries it in the Add-in feature that you have to enable. But once an engineer finds it, they will never go back to almost anything else.
Among other things, I'll use it to create strings of commands in EAGLE. (Midrange circuitboard schematic/board-editor software.)
Space a bunch of parts evenly, rotate them in sequence, rotate according to position....yes, Excel can do that. Assemble the coordinates and part names, splice them together with some IF statements to make strings, then copy/paste the commands into EAGLE.
Or take advantage of its built-in graphing capabilities: Someone at work created an external program to slice up a text file containing data to analyze, then it spits out a multi-megabyte CSV file, and finally it instructs Excel to open that file and generate a bunch of easily-editable graphs of the data.
Facebook
Twitter