Microsoft Excel is such a flexible and powerful tool that you can use in all manner of situations. Below, is a screen shot of an Excel spreadsheet application we have developed that encapsulates the quadratic equation. It plots the quadratic graph over a specified range, and displays the chart data. The coefficient input for the quadratic is entered by the user and also displayed. Then, immediately after the user has entered the coefficient data, the graph updates and the solutions for the quadratic equation are calculated and shown in spreadsheet cells B6, and C6. There is also a button control on the spreadsheet to take you to the developers home page which, in this case, is us, at gwycon.com!

Quadratic equation spreadsheet. Layout of controls, data, and chart.

As mentioned above, whenever the spreadsheet updates automatically the quadratic equation solutions are calculated immediately and displayed to the user. This happens by means of a custom programmed spreadsheet function to calculate the solutions to a quadratic equation. If the solutions turn out to be complex, the function returns the string “Err!”. continue

Polynomial Explorer is an application developed in C# using Visual Studio 2008. It was written to graph and display a polynomial equation with terms included up to the 6th degree (x⁶). Any combination of terms can be displayed and each term is controlled by a slider to alter a terms coefficient value. The user interface has been designed so that the equation is displayed clearly and the terms can be altered in an intuitive method via the slider controls. continue