Add-in Package Gives Spreadsheets Extraordinary Calculating Capabilities through a Simple Interface

December 11, 1998–Wolfram Research, Inc. today announced the release of Mathematica Link for Excel, an easy-to-use interface between Microsoft Excel and Mathematica, the world’s only fully integrated technical computing system. Mathematica Link for Excel greatly expands the kinds of calculations available within an Excel spreadsheet, giving the user access to a vast number of mathematical and statistical functions as well as to a new level of programmability.

“Many Excel users have found they’ve reached the limits of Excel’s macro language and plotting capabilities and wish for an easy way to stretch its computing power,” said Julie Pitney, Product Manager, Mathematica Link for Excel, at Wolfram Research. "Mathematica Link for Excel gives them a whole new kind of mathematical power, letting them do calculations they couldn’t dream of before. It provides them with a large collection of math functions, sophisticated statistical analysis, increased numeric precision, powerful yet simple programming, and even true symbolic algebra."

Mathematica has already earned a solid reputation as the calculating tool of choice among leading scientists, engineers, and financial analysts. Now, by using Mathematica Link for Excel to interface with Mathematica, Excel users can tap into the power of this exciting software. Users will be able to manipulate and visualize data and equations with over a thousand added commands and options–all documented, with literally thousands of examples, in the online Mathematica Help Browser. It’s easy to send large data sets from Excel to Mathematica for the kind of sophisticated analysis Excel can’t do alone and then to return the results right into a spreadsheet. The Mathematica function wizard helps users start taking advantage of Mathematica right away, even if they’ve never used Mathematica before. And since Mathematica itself is extensible, users can easily bring the additional power of Mathematica Applications Library add-ons like Finance Essentials right into Excel.

Because Mathematicacontains built-in capabilities for an extraordinary range of calculations and functions, it can already do many of the operations for which the user might otherwise need to write and debug complicated macros. And writing a new, specialized function in Mathematica’s intuitive, high-level language is much faster and easier than writing the same function exclusively within Excel’s syntax.

Mathematica Link for Excel requires Mathematica 3 or later. It works with individual copies of Mathematica or across networks with site-licensed or network-licensed versions of Mathematica. On Windows systems, Mathematica Link for Excel is compatible with Microsoft Excel 95 (7.0) and Excel 97. On Macintosh systems, Mathematica Link for Excel is compatible with Microsoft Excel 5.0 and Excel 98.