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Open Thread: How are you using Excel?
Merlin Mann | Aug 22 2006
Yesterday, I mentioned I'd been talking with someone who's looking at interesting things people are doing with Microsoft Excel. I talked to her again yesterday, and with her official okey-dokey, I'll virtually introduce Tralee Pearce (*waves*), a reporter from Toronto's Globe & Mail whom you might remember from a very swell article about the Hipster PDA. So, by request -- and to help Tralee with fleshing out her fun-sounding article -- I hope you all will jump in here: What kind of cool, novel, and non-obvious stuff are you doing with Excel? What's the wildest, most obsessive, most nerdy thing you ever saw someone do with our favorite spreadsheet program? 119 Comments
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 I experimentally discovered the 256...Submitted by Chris (not verified) on August 22, 2006 - 1:45pm.
I experimentally discovered the 256 column limit in Excel when I was calculating all the forces in a 5-bar mechanism (2 linked 4-bars). When I was done, I had 107 columns by 390 rows of data (with 7 columns of labels and 18 rows of input data) on my main calculation sheet. I had a total of 4 data sheets and 21 graph sheets (each of which had an average of 8 data series). That spreadsheet was cool because it started from first principles, like the weight and center of gravity of what we were lifting. I've used Excel to plot the deformation of an object. You take the X,Y position of a point on the object, find the dX and dY deflection of that point, multiply those by a scale factor (so you can see microscopic delfection), and add those magnified deflections to the X,Y positions. Repeat for the entire object, then plot those points with a scatter graph. Adjust the scales of your graphs so that a circle looks round. (I print on 8.5x11, so I make sure that the ratio of the scales is close to 8.5:11.) Voila, a visualization of your deformed widget. If you plot the original X,Y points on the same sheet, you'll get a nice comparison. These guys have figured out how to quickly see your data without a complicated graph which is seperated from the data: in-cell graphing. You put a bar-graph in the cell next to the data with the =rept() function. http://www.juiceanalytics.com/weblog/?p=236 http://www.juiceanalytics.com/weblog/?p=239 http://www.juiceanalytics.com/weblog/?p=240 Yeah, just search for "excel" at Juice Analytics, they've got some great stuff. » POSTED IN:
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