Implementing Legacy Programs For Quality Engineering in a Spreadsheet Environment

Abstract

Over the years, creative researchers and quality practitioners have published many useful and freely available FORTRAN and BASIC programs, implementing methods that are useful to quality engineers and industrial statisticians. But it is becoming less common to find a FORTRAN compiler or BASIC interpreter installed on the average workstation, making this prior work less accessible to the masses that rely on personal computers running Windows. We propose a methodology for converting legacy FORTRAN and BASIC programs to run as VBA macros in the Excel environment. Using our approach, moderately literate programmers can effectively migrate legacy algorithms to the ubiquitous Excel spreadsheet tool, where users will again have ready access to past algorithm contributions.

Keywords:

• BASIC
• Computer programs
• FORTRAN
• STATLIB
• VBA
• Visual Basic.

Notes

¹We use syntax highlighting throughout this paper. Code is listed in a monospaced font. VBA keywords are listed in boldface . Comments, which begin with a single quote mark, are italicized.

²An underscore (_) at the end of a line is the line continuation marker in VBA.