All politics and tirades about Microsoft's practices and market share aside:
As an engineer I frequently use tabular data from various published
references. Now I could develop a UDF for the original differential equation
from which the tabular data was created. (Then why did I buy the book?) Or
I could use SLOPE, LINEST and so forth as discussed in some of the notes
above in this thread. (But working out those nested formulae would take ten
times as long as doing it by hand on a piece of scratch paper.) Or I could
(and did) write my own UDF to do a simple linear interpolation between two
data points, something like =MYINTERPOLATE(Y-Data,X-Data,X-Point). But by
far the easiest way for me would be if it already existed as a standard
function available with Excel. I must confess, I really like Excel; it has
tremendous capabilities and has taken me way beyond where I could go, back in
the bad old days of sliderules. And I think the guys that built in all its
features and functions have done an amazing job. They thought of solutions
to problems I haven't even imagined yet. It just surprises me that not only
did they miss this obvious winner, but seem to want to argue about how it is
not worth doing. We seem to be forgetting that the fundamental purpose of
this tremendous spreadsheet program is to provide an EXCEL-lent tool for
scientists, engineers, business managers and the like to use in the execution
of their business. Making widgets or whatever. We engineers and business
managers do not simply exist to provide a market for a software company. A
lesson I've learned from over 25 years of marriage: RECOGNIZE THE CORRECT
ANSWER WHEN TOLD! Excel should have an easy-to-use interpolate function.

And while they're at it, how about making it easy to categorize your own
UDFs and have them available from a master file of some sort? It would be
great to be able to cluster the many complex UDFs I've written into groupings
like "Steam Formulae", "Combustion Formulae", and so on without having to go
through the relatively painful process it now requires to accomplish such a
goal. And be able to call them up even if the original worksheet where I
created them is not currently open. Can it be done now? Yes. Is it easy?
No. Please . . . make it easy.

Keep up the good work. Make it better.

Mark

"tskoglund" wrote:

I wish it were that simple. But Office is a virtual monopoly, and the
legions of employess that work for organizations that standardize on it have
no vote.

I suppose the executives are "in touch" if the company remains profitable,
but the out-of-touchTushar Mehta's of Microsoft are giving me tremendous
encouragement to support and buy alternative products at least for home use.
How hard can it be to add an INTERPOLATE function? 2 hours of programming
time maybe?

At any rate, thanks for your humbling rebuttal to Tushar.

"Harlan Grove" wrote:

tskoglund wrote...
....
Shame on the Excel managers for screwing up on this one. Apparently they've
lost touch. Too bad the competition isn't stronger to shake them up a little
bit.
....

Never, ever accuse Microsoft of losing touch until you see their
revenues
decline quarter-to-quarter for a full year. Microsoft does what it
needs to do
AND NO MORE in order to keep the revenues flowing. The history of the
last two
Office 'upgrades', at least from the Excel perspective, is that they
don't
need to do much to get companies and individuals to upgrade. It'd be
irrational for them to do more. The irrational parties are anyone who
upgraded
from Office 2000.

You're absolutely right about the benefits of competition. The only
good news
here is that Microsoft did such a good job with its older versions
compared to
the dearth of new/interesting features in the the two latest versions
that
they do face competition . . . from their own older versions.

You want to make Microsoft actually WORK for their money? Don't upgrade
to
Office 2006, especially if it requires an OS upgrade to do so.