Category: Microsoft Office

Poking around in the menus of Microsoft Word and other document processing tools, you may run across terms such as “widows,” “orphans,” and “kerning.” These are terms from typography that refer to how the text in a document is formatted. In this article, I’ll discuss a few of those terms you might see in Microsoft […]

A mathematician friend of mine worked for the Navy on calculations involving the movement of sound waves through water. It’s a difficult problem, since the speed of sound varies with temperature and salinity. Being a mathematician to the core, he always wanted the exact answer. At times the Navy had to shake him by the […]

Monte Carlo Methods in Excel: Part 3 – Some Helpful Tricks Andea S. , a student in Learning Tree’s course Power Excel: Analyzing Data to Make Business Decisions, expressed dismay about a problem at work. When she attempted to plot the results of her Monte Carlo inventory and production model, her entire set of model […]

Monte Carlo Methods in Excel: Part 2 – Random Numbers All Monte Carlo methods rely on a source of random numbers. Most such sources would more precisely be called pseudorandom numbers, since a deterministic algorithm cannot, by definition, ever produce truly random numbers. If you Google “random numbers” you will encounter a daunting list of […]

If we toss a coin 1000 times, it is pretty easy to calculate the probability of tossing exactly 537 heads. For better or for worse, the real world rarely offers us such cut-and-dry calculations. What if we were trying to calculate neutron density in a critical mass of plutonium? A mathematically precise result is beyond […]