OCN
499C
Using MS
EXCEL to analyze oceanographic data.
Winter 2001
Instructor: Prof. Brian Lewis
This course will provide "hands-on"
experience in the use of a spreadsheet program (MS Excel) in a networking or
WEB environment. Excel is a very powerful program that is widely used in
solving scientific problems as well as being widely used in many business
applications. In addition to the many functions that are built into Excel one
can also use Visual Basic to write code for functions specific to the problem
at hand. Visual Basic is an object-oriented
language that is also part of Excel. In
the WEB environment one now has access to enormous data resources and the
ability to share ones results and ideas by outputting a scientific paper to a
WEB page that is accessible world wide. Knowing how to access these data,
process these data using Excel (where
appropriate), and publish results on the WEB is essential in today's world.
In this course you will be shown how to use
FTP (and other file transfer programs) to move data from one computer to
another, how to use the email system to send data and graphs to others, how to
use the basic spreadsheet capabilities of Excel, how to write Visual Basic code
to generate your own functions and subs in Excel and to apply these to the
analysis of real Oceanographic data and how to generate and publish a WEB page
report. More detailed information is available on the Web at
http://www.ocean.washington.edu/people/faculty/blewis
This course is a Credit/No Credit Course. It
will meet twice a week for about 80 min in the Fisheries computer lab. Students
are expected to show up for all classes but may sign up for variable credits depending
on individual load considerations. This course will not be counted toward your
degree requirement of 20 credits of upper-division science.
A separate course is taught in the use of Matlab to solve Oceanographic problems.
Matlab uses matrix methods to manipulate and process data and is capable of
many tasks (especially graphical representations) which are not possible with Excel. However Matlab does require
more extensive mathematical and programming skills than normal use of Excel
does. On the other hand many of the problems encountered in Oceanography can be
easily and quickly solved with Excel and do not require the specialized math
tools of Matlab. For example the solving of non-linear inverse problems with
Excel has been made really easy. Ideally knowledge of both is helpful.
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Table
of Contents
Exercise 1: Getting familiar with EXCEL
Exercise 2: Transferring data between computers and importing
data to EXCEL
Exercise 3: Using Visual Basic with EXCEL
Exercise 4: Using EXCEL to process navigation data
Exercise 5: Using EXCEL to process CTD data
Exercise 6: Using EXCEL to calculate statistics
Exercise 7: Using EXCEL to solve inverse problems
Exercise 8: Using Fourier transforms to get the spectrum of a
data series
Exercise 9: Putting information on the World Wide Web
Exercise 10: Final project