Forget about Excel. It is hopeless for any serious work. (If you need convincing, see Errors, faults and fixes for Excel.) Any research student in the quantitative sciences should be using a matrix language for computation. I recommend students use R. It is free, has a big user base, and has zillions of add-on packages.

Blog posts about R

• Building R packages for Windows
• Debugging in R
• Finding an R function
• Installing R
• Learning R by video
• Organization and R
• R books
• R graph with two y-axes
• R help links
• R help on StackOverflow
• R workshop
• Time series packages on R
• Using Google Reader
• Workflow in R