You've likely had experience using Excel to handle data analysis and manipulation. That's fine for 20700 and 20800 but for real physics work, you'll need to expand your tool kit.
These are applications that are specifically designed for writing code. Here are two free ones we like.
Some suggestions, based on what the current methods of practicing physicists and astronomers tend to use:
Python has become one of the primary tools for astronomy and physics work. It's not the best for certain things, but it is overall quite helpful and will serve you well in the future if you spend some time with it now. Most incarnations are either open source or free to use. You can use Google Colab or the Anaconda framework to get started quickly.
Matlab is a very commonly used package for data analysis in many research labs. It's great for scripting analysis routines for repetitive experimental work. For example, if you had to compile the results of 100 experiments to obtain a single plot. It is a commercial application though, so installation does require a license, which is available at CCNY currently.
This commercial application is available for students at CCNY via a campus site license. Installation instructions here: Mathematica/CCNY
It's great for *checking* your integrals, making plots of functions, and data analysis as well.
Some of you will have probably used excel for basic science applications, like intro lab work or some basic plotting. In general, practicing physicists do not use spreadsheets for much, other than keeping track of budgets or lab expenditures. The reasons are many, but a few to note:
Scalability: While it's easy to make a scatter plot of 100 data points in excel, doing the same thing for 10,000 data points or 10 million data points quickly becomes very awkward and slow.
Analysis: Excel only contains very basic functions for curve fitting. E.g. Have a sinusoidal function you want to fit to extract the parameters of an oscillator? Excel can't help you there.
Portability: Let's say you made a nice excel file with all sorts of cool plots and stuff. And then you want to share it. How do you know if the person you share it with will see the same thing? Maybe they have an old version of excel that doesn't have the same features as yours. There's no guarantee that what you see is what they will see.
There are two main categories of computer drawing methods: vector and bitmap. A bitmap image (like a .jpg or .png) is simply a big matrix of data with the color of every pixel defined in the array. A vector drawing on the other hand, contains code that says make a square here, make a line here, etc. Formats like .svg and .eps are vector formats. Bitmaps are great for photographs, microscopy images, telescope data, etc. But plots and circuit diagrams and schematic illustrations are usually better done as vector drawings.
Illustrator is what I use for circuits, but other, in-browser app, options would be: