Excel is a popular spreadsheet software program that is widely used in many fields, including engineering. It is a flexible tool that enables users to arrange, examine, and visualize data as well as do several calculations and operations on it. Excel has a lot of valuable capabilities, but it also has a few shortcomings that make it less than ideal for some engineering tasks. Here are five shortcomings of Excel in engineering:
Firstly, Excel's lack of precision is one of its main drawbacks in engineering. Excel is not designed for highly precise calculations, and it often rounds numbers to a set number of decimal places, which can lead to errors in calculations. This can be particularly challenging in the engineering field since even minor mistakes can have serious repercussions.
Another shortcoming of Excel is its limited ability to handle substantial amounts of data. Excel is designed for working with small to medium-sized datasets, and it can become slow and unresponsive when working with large datasets. In engineering, where data sets can be exceedingly huge and complex, this might be an issue.
Excel's lack of flexibility in terms of data visualization is a third shortcoming. Excel allows users to create basic charts and graphs, but it does not offer a wide range of options for visualizing data. For engineers who must produce intricate and thorough data visualizations, this might be constraining.
Excel is lack of integration with other engineering software. Excel is a stand-alone tool that does not work well with other software, such as CAD (Computer Aided Design) or finite element analysis (FEA) packages. This may limit the ability of engineers who use Excel.
Excel lacks many of the features and functionalities that are expressly created for engineering work because it is not a specialized engineering tool. This means that engineers who use Excel may have to work around its limitations or use workarounds and macros to perform certain repetitive tasks. This can impede the productivity of engineers who use Excel and be time-consuming. Also, the modification of the excel sheet by a colleague may lead to corruption of the excel sheet or loss of function or correct data in cells.
To summarize, Excel is a useful and versatile tool for many purposes, but it has several flaws that make it unsuitable for engineering tasks. Its lack of precision, limited ability to handle large datasets, lack of flexibility in data visualization, lack of integration with other engineering software, and lack of specialized engineering features all contribute to its unsuitability for many engineering applications. Visit our engineering development environment, TwinIDE, to perform engineering calculations in a more productive and faster manner. You can also save your calculations as a ready-to-use web application with a QR code to reuse, distribute and protect.
