OK, but if cost is a concern, why not go with http://gnu.org/software/octave/ if you love Matlab syntax, or else with http://www.r-project.org/ Both are even cheaper than Excel: free!
I agree with Rodney...you're fooling yourself and wasting your time trying to run real time spreadsheets that are huge. even if you have RTD (which is a must) you'll revert back to DDE speed when perform a gross amount of calculations
I have had no problems with RTD, once I set the throttle speed. Depends on what your sheet is doing, but like i said, we run real time sheets with 6,000-8,000 links with no problems. Actually, when BB is running right, it's very surprising how close it is to the actual market (as seen through exchange lines). TNG
Because Excel is taught at every High School and University I have ever seen. Unless you didn't pay attention at school, you already know how to use excel. Octave and R are tremendous products, but are far more complex tools than excel in terms of the sophistication required to use them. They are basically specialized programming languages. If you know what a cell is and a formula, you can use excel to do some very sophisticated things. nitro
It's easy to get started in Excel, but I've seen many spreadsheets grow like kudzu, becoming unmaintainable and unverifiable. Such projects would better have been undertaken in a real statistical programming environment such as Octave or R. Once an Excel sheet grows to include array-formulae, database functions, pivot-tables, and VBA, it's gone beyond what "high school" or "university" students typically learn, and the time learning the extra Excel skillz would have been better spent elsewhere. Here's a real-life question I often face, and probably you do to: suppose you have a project you've worked on, and you want to pass it on to a colleague in a simple email. Octave/R code, you send a script as plaintext, and in a sense it's self-documenting. The recipient reads through the code, and knows exactly how the script works. But with an Excel sheet? He has to examine every last cell, hoping he didn't miss something somewhere, and hunt around for VBA code to boot...
Whoa, this must be a first for E'trader. It's customary to call other posters on a thread "assclown" or some such...
if you need a class to be productive in any of the above mentioned programs/languages then you are probably not very bright and will only generate crap.
Many people that I know that are not techie have produced some very nice excel spreadsheets, e.g., my ex-wife. She learned to use it in school. Of course, any programmer can pick up Excel in a weekend with a good resource book or just the internet as a reference. I don't have this prejudice. nitro
Since you are very bright, could you honor us with some postings of your non-cr#ppy Matlab/Octave and R code? Thanks.