Is there any quick way (pc program) to calculate slope of curve?

Hey all,

Ok I have a problem in that i have about 58 batches of data and have a
plot of a curve for each batch. I need to calculate the slope of the
steepest part of each curve and am restricted for time! Does anyone
know of a quick way to do this without printing off each graph and
calcalating tangents! Currently my data is in excel however I could
put transer it to MATLAB or download another program you can
recommend???

Also what technique do you recommend to use to fit a curve of best fit
to the data??????

Thank you

Please can anyone shed any light on this topic. I need to have this done in by tomorrow??!!!!!

Is your data set up so you could estimate the slope by calculate (y2-y1)/(x2-x1) for consecutive points? You could then use the MAX function to determine the maximum slope.

As for curve fitting, I do quite a bit of curve fitting. What kind of curve do you expect the data to fit? Line? polynomial? exponential? other? Excell has built in functions to deal with linear and exponential curves (see online help under LINEST, TREND, GROWTH, LOGEST). Polynomials supposedly can be handled using the linear functions, but I prefer to do it myself rather than trust the built in functions (Sometimes I even do it myself for linear functions and exponential functions). It's pretty easy to do using Excel's built in matrix functions.