Displays the inputed data in a certain way?

I got a job to do, heres the description:


Can you think of a better language or way of taking data from an excell style database thingamichango?

Multiple Regression animation: specifications I would like to be able to: 1. input a number of triples of numbers (X, Y, Z) representing points in 3-D space, and for the points to appear as dots in a display on the screen. 2. input a triple of numbers representing intercept, slope on the X-Z plane, and slope on the X-Y plane, and for the corresponding plane to appear in the display, as visible but transparent (so you can see the points through it). The two slopes should appear as lines on the display, where the plane cuts the X-Z, Y-Z planes. 3. alter the parameters of the plane (intercept, etc) by simple operations: perhaps mouse click and move on sliders on the screen. 4. rotate the whole display in 3-D. 5. display the sum of squares of the vertical distances of the points from the plane, in order to show that a unique position of the plane gives a minimal value for this (the regression plane of best fit). 6. display the residuals, ie lines joining the points to the nearest point (vertically) on the plane.

In my experience the most painless way to read from or write to an '.xls' or a '.xlsx' file has been vbs. If this is just a comma or tab delimited text file then any text parser will do. I use Excel A LOT at my job, I even use it for tasks that it really was never meant to be used for such as floor plan diagrams (there is a reason). But this is the first time I have ever seen it considered for 3-D animation. I somehow think that we could find a better tool for this job.

Heh, this reminds me of Hamsterman's cli 3d renderer

It is far easier to write a Google Apps script for Google Sheets.

https://script.google.com/

So im going to do this in mathmatica, is this releltivley easy, does anyone have any experience?

No, this is not easy at all outside of VB Script. Anything from the MS Office suite is built to work through it's own namespace*. Things like VB Script and Powershell are purposefully built to work with those namespaces so it's notably less painful. But anything else is going to have to handle the library imports and manage any indirection on it's own. With some patience, I have most things working reasonably well with C\C++ through COM*, but I would personally not have the patience to try anything else. If you're going to try anything but VBS, then this might be the only time in my life I suggest looking at Python for a possible solution.

*: With the exception of Outlook. This application has it's own namespace, but nothing about Outlook was designed to cooperate with anything.

**: F@#$ Outlook.

So seriously python??

can I learn that from scratch in two weeks
im still not grasping linear progression!!

I found a version of mathematica I can use its got a regression package but the lines and dots I have no idea about