Typical Applications of Microcomputer Spreadsheets to Electrical Engineering Problems

This paper describes typical applications of a popular spreadsheet program, SuperCalc, to a variety of electrical engineering problems using the IBM Personal Computer. The problems selected are series resonance in ac circuits, loop analysis of dc circuits, uniform plane wave propagation in conducting media, and the Runge-Kutta fourth-order numerical integration routine for initial value problems. These examples amply demonstrate how SuperCalc exploits the power of the microcomputer to automate many time-consuming "what if" computational chores by functioning as a visible processor with a "scrollable" on-line window on the machine-stored worksheet. The templates created for the application examples cited in the paper clearly underscore the fact that problem solving with SuperCalc is data-oriented rather than program-oriented, unlike problem solving with computers using the conventional approach. The paper also shows the integral relationship between spreadsheet and graphics software packages by using Micrograph (a graphics software) to extract graphic displays from the SuperCalc-generated numbers. Because of their versatility, visible numeric processors like SuperCalc offer interesting and exciting potential as important user-friendly tools in electrical engineering education.