What are the advantages of using spreadsheets in numerical modelling?
The advantages are: (a) Spreadsheets allow you to tabulate a lot of numerical data fairly easily and neatly. Data must be entered accurately of course. (b) Spreadsheets allow you to enter formulae of various kinds and hence calculations are completed instantaneously. This is time saving especially if there is a lot of data and/or the calculations are complex. (c) The big advantage of spreadsheets in numerical modelling is that they allow you to do lots of ‘what if’ experiments very quickly One or two parameters can be changed and the the effect of doing this on other parameters can be observed. (d) Spreadsheets allow you to display data and changes to data graphically. This visualisation of numerical modelling is very helpful. (e) Spreadsheets can be shared with other people easily and this is an advantage when a team is working on a particular numerical model. (f) All of the advantages listed above lead to another very important advantage. That is the numerical model can be changed an
