The Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet is a formidable educational tool but lacks native functions that would allow easy working with complex numbers and polynomials, so preventing its widespread use in most electrical engineering courses. Such limitations could be overcome using the open source XNumbers add-in package, bringing to Excel new numerical capabilities which have been available to students only in high-end scientific packages, such as Matlab® or Scilab. Here, we present an application of those features in control engineering courses, treating the specific case of a second-order feedback system with dynamic response by the root-locus method.
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