Plotting equations in Excel

Roberto Mensa share this post today on G+, reminding me about the Google instant graph capability, and of course I wondered if the same thing could be achieved in Excel.

Excel doesn’t really know how to create a function plot. It generally needs you to create a table of data, that can then be plotted. However, thanks to the use of array functions, named ranges, the old excel evaluate function, and some tweaking (as described in this informit article by  Rob Bovey, Stephen Bullen,  and John Green), I was able to create a plotter for formulas that doesn’t need any data or any VBA. Here’s the first one, generated from these parameters

y= (SQRT(COS(x))*COS(200 *x)+SQRT(ABS(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01
x from -1.57
x to 1.57
no of points 10000

 

 

 

You can download this from funnyCharts.xlsm workbook. You can find more information on the Excel Liberation site. Following the same principal, here’s how to do the Batman Plot.

 

 

About brucemcp 225 Articles
I am a Google Developer Expert and decided to investigate Google Apps Script in my spare time. The more I investigated the more content I created so this site is extremely rich. Now, in 2019, a lot of things have disappeared or don’t work anymore due to Google having retired some stuff. I am however leaving things as is and where I came across some deprecated stuff, I have indicated it. I decided to write a book about it and to also create videos to teach developers who want to learn Google Apps Script. If you find the material contained in this site useful, you can support me by buying my books and or videos.

2 Comments

Comments are closed.