I have a curvilinear function in an Excel spreadsheet. I would like Excel
to calculate the definite integral for me. Does anyone have any advice on
how I can develop or find add-in functions to do this?
Search the Google Groups archive in the *excel* newsgroups for the terms
integrate or integral or the phrase 'area under'. This has been discussed
before, and standard trapezoid and Simpson's methods have been offered. I don't
recall if anyone has given a quadrature approach, but it's not unlikely, so you
could search for the term quadrature too.
These are all numeric methods. If you're looking for symbolic integration, Excel
isn't an appropriate tool. If you're willing to spend $$$, there's Mathematica,
Maple, MathCAD, Derive. I believe the student version of MuPad is free or cheap.
If you can only afford bandwidth, there's DATAPLOT from the U.S. government's
NIST site, but using it is kinda like traveling back in time.
