Excel Cooks

"Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook," by David M. Bourg, O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol, CA, 2006. 424 pages. ISBN: 0-596-00879-1. $44.99.

When you need to use curve fitting, statistics, integration, and other operations that apply to engineering, you'll find this volume a worthy handbook. Each of the more than 130 sections presents a problem and a solution, and as needed, a complete example. The author often covers the math behind an operation and explains how he created test-data sets for use in examples. Fourier analysis, for instance, has its own 10-page section that provides many screen shots and clear explanations. The book even includes a section on programming with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

You'll find this book a compilation of practical information and you'll refer to it often as you analyze and present data. I particularly liked Bourg's chapter on charting. Although I use Excel to display simple graphs, I never mastered the use of multiple axes. The how-to examples and descriptions provide the instructions needed to add extra axes to plots. And I learned how to effectively plot 3D surfaces, too. I recommend this book highly.

	A noisy signal conceals a 65-Hz square-wave and a 41.5-Hz sine wave (top). The amplitude plot of Excel’s FFT results (bottom) shows the square-wave components and the sine wave.

"Excel by Example; a Microsoft Excel Cookbook for Electronics Engineers," by Aubrey Kagan, Newnes (Elsevier), Burlington, MA, 2004. 364 pages. ISBN: 0-7506-7756-2. $39.99.

Although subtitled, "...for Electronics Engineers," anyone involved with engineering applications will find useful information in this book. You may not need each of the book's 16 complete examples, but by reviewing the VBA code behind them, you'll learn more about how to program your own Excel macros. Unlike some books that explain programming step-by-step, Kagan presents complete examples that show how commands work together. Granted, you won't get an explanation of each command or statement, but you can extract useful information about operations that apply to your macros. My one quibble with the book is the lack of comments in many VBA listings.

The author provides examples that include a voltage-to-current converter, a mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) calculator, and a voltage-regulator circuit calculator. The examples are not static. In the MTBF example, you can create "what-if" conditions that let you apply variables to see how they affect an outcome. The book includes a CD-ROM that contains examples, as well as an e-Book version of the text. As you learn by doing, you'll gain experience using Excel for spreadsheet analyses and you'll learn more about programming macros. (Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of Design News also publishes the Newnes series of books.)

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