An Excel® application for calculus in Geomatics Engineering

Abstract

Geomatics engineering is a new developing engineering discipline which focuses in information that needs a location and incorporates other fields of engineering, such as surveying, geodesy or mathematical cartography. These disciplines require calculation procedures that cover a great variety of calculus and, unless institutions and universities offer free online applications to solve basic calculus, users often have to switch applications to develop certain calculation procedures. So the idea was to develop a single application with helps our students to solve the most common problems of our subjects. The spreadsheet Microsoft Excel® should be a good option for our purpose because it is a well-known and widely used tool for users of different level of computer applications but it is short of functions which deals with the specific problems attached to these disciplines. So, we have developed an add-in, a set of functions packed in a file that add optional commands to Excel, to improve Excel®functionality and to help in the calculus in surveying, geodesy and mathematical cartography. This add-in also includes additional mathematical functions designed to solve more general problems.