walters,
Excel has built-in functions to calculate most of the parameters that are used in engineering:
. Trig
. Exponential
. Imaginary/Complex numbers
. Statistics
. Searching and sorting
In addition it has built-in graphing capability
As a result, Excel can be used to perform many common engineering calculation tasks.
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Excel has a built-in programming language called VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). VBA is a very powerful language that can be used to write programs that that would otherwise require a general purpose programming language, such as C or C++. The nice thing about VBA for Excel is that it can take advantage of Excel's built-in user interface, printing, graphing capabilities. Give VBA a try, even if you have no immediate use for it. You may even get hooked
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Access is a database manager. It is used for managing, manipulating, searching, sorting data. As an example, suppose you have a database of electronic components in your inventory. The daatabase has electrical parameters in fields for each part number. Access could be used, for example to find all capacitors with a capacitance between 0.1 and 0.47 uF, with a voltage rating grater than or eaual to 50V, and a metallized polycarbonate dielectric.
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Outlook is useful for e-mail tasks, and managing appointments, meetings, contacts.
Regards.
Kral