Throughout the years I found Excel and Word to be powerful Engineering tools. It's interesting to see the author relied heavily on these tools to assemble the database.

Excel, in particular, at least for me, has always been a powerful productivity booster. A small list of what I've done with the program includes:

- Calculation and exploration of coefficient tables for polyphase FIR filters for FPGA designs (including auto-magically producing Verilog code to paste into my modules).

- Generation and maintenance of C code for embedded system control panel menu state machine. Version control was easily handled using sheets. Again, copy-and-paste code right into compiler.

- Acoustics calculations for professional digital theater design including room resonant modes, full surface material database, sound management calculators (Helmholtz resonators, etc.).

- Entry, generation and maintenance of I/O definitions for 1,000+ pin FPGA designs with copy-and-paste Verilog code output. This makes something that is virtually impossible to maintain with a code editor into a thing that is absolutely manageable.

- Entry, generation and maintenance of PCAD and later Altium Designer schematic symbol and PCB footprint for components with full IPC parameters. While Altium has improved this over the years there was a point in time when defining and maintaining something like a 400+ pin FPGA could take days (particularly with it's predecessor, PCAD). Using Excel for data entry by copy-and-pasting directly from PDF data sheets changed a days-long process into about an hour tops. This required about three months work writing a custom Excel tool in Visual Basic for Applications, which turbocharges Excel. Moving signals around, swapping banks and other options that would instill fear in almost any engineer were reduced to a five minute procedure using Excel.

- Automated processing and maintenance of design BOM's. Again, some custom VBA code. Grab BOM from PCAD/Altium and turn it into something that can be used, versioned and maintained during production.

- Simulation of FIFO input/output buffers for the implementation of a frame store in a real-time FPGA video processor project.

- Simulation of packet processor for the same project.

- Calculation and optimization of clock multiplier parameters for the generation of multiple desired frequencies within specified tolerance ranges

The list goes on. I also used PowerPoint with VBA code to simulate the operation of a control panel for both presentation and later product training applications. This code imported the aforementioned state machine definition and transformed otherwise static slides into something that worked almost exactly as the actual product.

This is something online versions and competitive online products (Google) have failed to effectively translate. The desktop versions of the MS Office suite are incredibly powerful. Granted, most people don't even begin to scratch the surface of what these can do. I believe it is very important for engineers to be very well versed on what these tools, particularly Excel, can do.

As a side note, I highly recommend this Excel add-on. It's a real time saver and makes for powerful processing of all manner of data you might need to shape and clean in producing everything from code to database table data:

http://www.asap-utilities.com/

No affiliation whatsoever, just a happy paid user for many years.