Excelling or Not

[LavCat]

Anyone know about spreadsheets? I am looking for a spreadsheet program for data acquisition (or at least for calculations and data presentation).

Excel integrates with Agilent's Command Expert software to talk to instuments. But Excel is not free. I'm sure there are freeware spreadsheets that would do calculations and graphing.

I'd like to be able to work with many thousands of rows. And I want only a spreadsheet, not a Gnomish army knife. The spreadsheet has to run under Windows 7 Pro 64 bit.

Any thoughts or suggestions or advice?

If it weren't so expensive an updated Visual Studio would be another option.

[Ruvanal]

A quick google of 'freeware spreadsheets' lead me to this page of information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spr...t_software
That should give you a good selection of different programs to look over that might do the job for you.

I suspect that Open Office (now Apache Open Office) will likely fit your need list. It has a long standing of being able to use Excel files and being exported to back.

[shoju]

I'm pretty sure that Open Office will do what you need it to do. I use it as the "office" program at work, and have yet to find something that Microsoft Office can do that Open Office can't. The only difference, is that some of the ways that Open Office does it, can seem a little.... weird at times.

[Taem]

I found some interesting articles searching for Open Office vs. Microsoft Office: Link

That one seems more like a sales pitch, however I like that it uses the Office 2003 format. I HATE the new "ribbon" format with a passion! MS lost a good paying customer because of that stupid design...

This one suggests if you have Excel document, they will be altered by Open Office and NOT look the same: Link

The issue I have is most of my Excel sheets use VBA Macros and I doubt Open Office supports that fully. I'll have to do more research.

[LavCat]

I've been reading a bit about Open Office, thanks. I think though that with Open Office I would give up integration with the Agilent data acquisition software.

[kandrathe]

Any thoughts or suggestions or advice?

It looks to me like Agilent integrates with MATLAB from MathWorks. I use excel daily, but I've heard good things about MATLAB. I also use SAS and R (R is the GNU S) for statistical analysis, but I don't do instrument controls.

http://www.mathworks.com/products/connec...62540.html

From the spec sheet it appears to integrate with "MATLAB, Visual Studio®, Excel®, LabVIEW, Agilent VEE, or Agilent SystemVue PC application environment"

[LavCat]

Any thoughts or suggestions or advice?

It looks to me like Agilent integrates with MATLAB from MathWorks. I use excel daily, but I've heard good things about MATLAB. I also use SAS and R (R is the GNU S) for statistical analysis, but I don't do instrument controls.

http://www.mathworks.com/products/connec...62540.html

From the spec sheet it appears to integrate with "MATLAB, Visual Studio®, Excel®, LabVIEW, Agilent VEE, or Agilent SystemVue PC application environment"

Matlab has always seemed like a fun toy, but it is almost fifteen times the cost of Excel. VS I've used (actually VC). I'd like to have VS, but it's too expensive for me. I've had a fair bit of experience with LabVIEW, but it's way out of my price range. VEE is about the same cost as Matlab. Don't even think about SystemVue! That leaves Excel.

[kandrathe]

That leaves Excel.

I thought it might end up there. It seems the most expedient, and probably more cost effective.

[Alram]

I use Open Office almost exclusively. There was one time when I had to use MS because Open Office would not save a particular formatting style which was required for submission of a manuscript. But that was a word processor document, not a spreadsheet; however, I could envision such a problem with the spreadsheet happening now and then.

[kandrathe]

I use Open Office almost exclusively. There was one time when I had to use MS because Open Office would not save a particular formatting style which was required for submission of a manuscript. But that was a word processor document, not a spreadsheet; however, I could envision such a problem with the spreadsheet happening now and then.

I use Open Office on machines that I don't have MS Office on. Since I'm in the academia, I get quite a discount -- e.g. academic pricing for the professional version is $58 (vs $344 retail) and our for organization it's cheaper as we do volume licensing (serverOS/APPS+staff+faculty+students) with the advantage of the @home option for employees (so, I can have a copy at home for $9.99). The overall cost of our MS License for the college is about $35K -- and it covers ~1000 faculty /staff and 3400 students. Net price is about $7.95 per person. But, they are still enamored with Google Apps (it's FREEE!!!) or is it?

At home I have 2 machines with MS Office, and 2 machines with Open Office.

[LavCat]

Latest update is that I found out about Office 2013 Preview and decided to sign up for it. But after registering for the preview when I finally got to the step of actually downloading something it never worked.

This was the same problem I had trying to register for Blizzard betas. In Microsoft's case the website wants to download

download_aspx?productReleaseID=O365SmallBusPremRetail&platform=X64&language=en-us&TaxRegion=pr&correlationId=1fe52592-c704-4da7-ade8-7b14b53e2edf&token=2139a91c-f0d1-4490-98c1-efdb85ebe17f&version=O15Beta2&source=O15OLSO365

but the download never works. I hate Microsoft. I even added their server to my trusted sites but that didn't help.

Blizzard can almost be forgiven, but here I am using a Microsoft browser running on a Microsoft OS to download a Microsoft file from a Microsoft server. You would think that they could make it work.

Edit: looking at Microsoft Answers it seems I am not the only one with this problem.

[Alram]

I use Open Office almost exclusively. There was one time when I had to use MS because Open Office would not save a particular formatting style which was required for submission of a manuscript. But that was a word processor document, not a spreadsheet; however, I could envision such a problem with the spreadsheet happening now and then.

I use Open Office on machines that I don't have MS Office on. Since I'm in the academia, I get quite a discount -- e.g. academic pricing for the professional version is $58 (vs $344 retail) and our for organization it's cheaper as we do volume licensing (serverOS/APPS+staff+faculty+students) with the advantage of the @home option for employees (so, I can have a copy at home for $9.99). The overall cost of our MS License for the college is about $35K -- and it covers ~1000 faculty /staff and 3400 students. Net price is about $7.95 per person. But, they are still enamored with Google Apps (it's FREEE!!!) or is it?

At home I have 2 machines with MS Office, and 2 machines with Open Office.

Humph. Since posting this, I encountered a problem with Open Office spreadsheets. My wife has 2 versions on her computer. She was using an older version just fine and then I installed the newer, latest version, so that she could have 1 word processor dedicated to the Spanish language, and another for English.
To make a long story short, when entering new data, the latest version would not compute a formula which had been created with the older version. The spreadsheet has to be opened with the older version in order for new data to be properly computed. I am not sure why.

[LavCat]

Since my last update I have been making progress. There was an IE security setting that prevented me from running the Microsoft installer, and presumably the Blizzard installer also.

It has been a slow process but I am now running the preview of 64-bit Excel 2013. Agilent has provided good tech support, and even given me files to work with Excel 2013, as their current distribution software is not compatible.

I have now completed an experiment and generated a graph of my speaker impedance vs. frequency...

B&W 801 Impedance


What I'd like to fix now is to find a way to make the data point size smaller. The default points are the size of beach balls and I can't find a setting to change the diameter.

As always, any help would be appreciated.


Edit: After asking a couple of places and getting no help, I stumbled upon the solution. The trick was that Excel calls the plot points "markers". I've been making x-y graphs for over fifty years and that terminology would not have occurred to me.

But no more beach balls. I have updated the graph in my link accordingly.