Comment Give Excel more credit! (Score 1) 1104
I am just wrapping up my chemical engineering degree at a top-tier US university. While we certainly have specialized tools to solve engineering problems, Excel was highly stressed.
The rationale was this: no matter what company I may be employed at, I will ALWAYS have access to Excel. Therefore, we were encouraged to leverage the built-in VBA to write algorithms for problem solving. Sure, we learned FORTRAN and some other languages, but Excel is arguably the most important in terms of real-world engineering work.
From my perspective as an engineer, I don't fault the school systems at all for pushing Excel. It's much more powerful than you may realize. I would hope that high schools *really* teach Excel and its VBA scripting capabilities. These experiences could seed further work in the more traditional languages used by computer science students, while also giving non-CS high schoolers a good grounding in basic computer programming.
The rationale was this: no matter what company I may be employed at, I will ALWAYS have access to Excel. Therefore, we were encouraged to leverage the built-in VBA to write algorithms for problem solving. Sure, we learned FORTRAN and some other languages, but Excel is arguably the most important in terms of real-world engineering work.
From my perspective as an engineer, I don't fault the school systems at all for pushing Excel. It's much more powerful than you may realize. I would hope that high schools *really* teach Excel and its VBA scripting capabilities. These experiences could seed further work in the more traditional languages used by computer science students, while also giving non-CS high schoolers a good grounding in basic computer programming.
