Wimpie writes:

Hello,

Thanks for replying Richard and Jim. I hoped somebody had a similar
problem and knew a work-around. I know Excel is not the perfect tool
to do this, but I did similar things with reasonable results. I hoped
using data tables would speed up the spreadsheet design (until now it
didn't).

I do not have OO.org installed on this machine. A brother in law has
it on his PC, so when I visit him I will try to load the worksheet
into OO calc (or set it up in OO calc).

When this (OO calc) doesn't give the desired result, I have to change
to something that supports programming. I am not a student so Matlab
might not be option. I looked at "octave", "python" and "R". These
require some study also. Other option is to use an old general purpose
SW development package (C or Pascal based).

I think I have to spend some time to decide what to use...

You can write plug-ins for Gnumeric in Python. However, it's best to
run Gnumeric on Linux (or another Unix of your choice). There is
Windows version, but unfortunately, it is somewhat unstable.

Jon LA4RT