First of all, I'd like to thank Jeremy Anthorp for his nomination and kind words. I reason I couldn't accept his nomination is that I've enrolled in a Bachelor of Science degree at Sydney University, mostly concentrating on advanced maths subjects. That's been keeping me pretty busy.
I'm also doing physics and chemistry - and both of these subjects require varying amounts of analysis of numerical data. In physics we use Microsoft Excel to analyse numerical data we collect - including determing how much uncertainty is in the result and a line or curve of best fit for the data we have found. To give you an example, in the first week we took the distance of all the planets in the solar system from the sun and the periods of their orbits and used them to test Kepler's Third Law. Intermediate steps required included plotting a log line and adding a trend line to the graph - complete with the trend line's equation and a correlation coefficient. How would I accomplish the same task using Gnumeric or Open Office Calc? Failing that, how would I accomplish the same task using some other sort of free software tool such as R or Octave? The above task took me a few mouse clicks in Excel but I couldn't find a way to accomplish the same task in Gnumeric or Open Office Calc easily. Neither of them seem to have a LINEST function, for instance. Thanks in advance. Mark -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
