A spreadsheet is a reasonably easy way to perform various numerical methods, especially differentiation. In our workshop, we will create – almost from scratch – a spreadsheet to compare the forward, backward and central divided difference approximations for the first derivative of a simple function. We start with FDA_BDA_CDA Exercise.xls, which has some of the basic text, but no formulas, and go from there. The objective is to get a sense for what it takes to create such a spreadsheet. Later workshops will look at how to re-use these and to do this in a more sophisticated numerical computation tool.

The FDA_BDA_CDA Exercise.xls  template is stored on Dropbox. Click here to download the file.

Workshop Instructions are here.