An automated office for the laboratory scientist

✍ Scribed by A.K. Hennessy; L.A. Roberts; S.Y. Chang Scoggins

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1986
• Weight: 868 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0745-7138
• DOI: 10.1016/0745-7138(86)90015-1

✦ Synopsis

Development

of sophisticated office information facilities for business record-keeping and report generation has created opportunities for automation of information-handling in many other fields. Spreadsheet facilities, specifically LOTUS l-2-3 on the Zenith Z-100, have been used to automate information-handling tasks in an experimental laboratory: to set up and maintain information in the laboratory notebook, to store and retrieve details about preparation and operation of each experiment in a series, to set up sampling rates and collect sample data from instruments, to perform statistical analysis, to tabulate and graph experiment results. The spreadsheet was used as the controlling facility to change and execute job control macros, to link to BASIC programs that controlled the analogue-digital converter and changed file formats so that the statistics package MICROSTAT could process files produced by the spreadsheet during the experiment. The outcome of the study was a LOTUS l-2-3 spreadsheet template which can be used in an experimental laboratory.