My brother asked me a question about how to do a math problem in Excel. I've only used Excel to make lists of things and haven't used it recently. It's true that I don't use spreadsheets in Open Office either, but I rather work on the problem in Fedora than in Windows. If I solve it in an Open Office spreadsheet, can it be saved as something compatible with Excel?
For those interested in spread sheet problems, it is roughly this:
The total cost of a project is the given amount P , in dollars.
The total duration of the project is the given time T, in months.
The expenditures-vs-time of the project are to be modeled by the typical bell curve, the density of a normal probability distribution (Even though this is not a probability problem, that shape curve is to be used.)
The peak of the curve occurs at T/2.
The span of time between time 0 and time T corresponds to a given number of standard deviations (for example, it might be 3 ).
Assume all funds are spent between time 0 and time T. Create a list of rows that that show each month, the amount expended during the month and the cumulative expenditures at the end of the month.
I don't know how advanced the calendar functions of Open Office or Exel are. I suspect it's permissible to pretend that T is a whole number of months and that all months are of the same length.
Linear Mode
