Recently I saw an interesting Earth Venus cosmic dance video on Facebook. See the original video below or here.
Although this is not entirely accurate from physics & astronomy perspectives, the dance is a stunning example of patterns that are generated by simple things.
I wanted to recreate this cosmic dance in Excel. How else am I to get my spreadsheet fix on a Saturday?
Here is a quick demo of the final outcome. Read on to learn more about the Earth Venus cosmic dance.
The details & assumptions
To create this cosmic dance, we need a few details
- Distance from Sun to Venus & Earth – 67.2 and 93 million KM respectively
- Number of days it takes to rotate around the sun – 224.7 and 365.25 respectively
We will also assume these incorrect things to keep our model simple
- Orbits of Earth & Venus are circular with Sun at center: In reality, they are elliptical, but as these are just stretched circles, we can assume circular orbits to keep the math simple.
- Sun is static: In reality, Sun (and entire solar system) is also moving. This means, this cosmic dance may never occur.
We also need one critical detail to graph this cosmic dance:
- The angular interval for plotting the lines. In the above examples, I have used 10° (ie there will be 36 lines around the circle). This is denoted by named range m in the model. You can adjust this in the output worksheet using a form control. Different values of m yield different patterns (although most of them will be pentagonal).
The math:
Generating planetary co-ordinates:
In a table, we will generate the positions (X & Y co-ordinates) of both Venus & Earth for 3000 points in time, each incremented by m degrees, starting at 0°.
To generate the X & Y values, we will use the x=r.cos? and y=r.sin? equations (where r is the distance from Sun and ? is the angle).
Drawing the lines:
This is the tricky part. At each step in the animation our line should from one tooth of the saw tooth pattern. See this demo to understand.
For more about this technique read – interactive network chart to map relationships between people.
So during each step of the animation, we add more co-ordinates to the chart (scatter plot) to generate this saw tooth pattern. Over time, this will yield the beautiful pentagonal cosmic dance.
We can generate these successive Venus & Earth co-ordinates from the calculations performed earlier by using MOD & INDEX formulas.
Once such saw tooth line data is generated, we will designate a cell to hold current animation position. Let’s call this pos.
We will then create two named formulas – dance.x and dance.y. These will contain the data necessary for our scatter plot. We will use OFFSET formula to generate these dynamic named formulas.
The chart
Now that all the necessary calculations are done, create a scatter plot with the dance co-ordinates. Set up X & Y axis minimum and maximum values accordingly (-160 to 160 should do). This ensures that the chart remains same no matter what step of animation we are on.
Also, add 3 more series to the chart
- One for a dot to represent Venus at current position
- One for a dot to represent Earth at current position
- One for a line connecting Venus to Earth
The animation
Next, let’s add a small macro to animate the chart. This macro will increment pos from 1 to a large number. After each iteration, we will call DoEvents so Excel can re-draw the chart. That is all.
Download the Earth Venus dance workbook
Click here to download the Earth Venus cosmic dance workbook. Enable macros to enjoy the dance. Play with form control to adjust the animation speed and pattern. Examine the data tab to learn more about the calculations.
Did you enjoy the dance?
I really liked the original video on FB and that is why I recreated this in Excel. This is a great exercise to show the power of simple things generating extraordinary patterns.
What about you? Do you like this Earth Venus dance?
More Excel animation and fun:
If you like animating things, you are going to love these tutorials. Check out,
23 Responses to “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”
Its possible to display up to 4 text values.
Have a look at the screen shot of an example that I had posted way back at the EHA and figure out how its done !
http://tinypic.com/r/muzywk/6
With Excel 2010 you can use Conditional Formatting to apply custom number formats which can display text. (In older versions you can only modify text color and cell background color, but not number formats.) Using CF allows for an even larger number of different display values.
[...] Display text values in Pivot Tables without VBA [...]
Hey,
Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating text?
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn't a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn’t a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
[...] Pivot Tables take tables of data and allow the user to summarise and consolidate the data at the same time. This is a great and very fast method of analysis but is restricted to handling mathematical functions on the value field resulting in numerical summaries. – read more [...]
[…] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]
There is a very good way actually for handling text inside values area.
First you create a special column on the very left side and call it ID, and put unique ID (numbers only), and then create a pivot table with:
Row Labels and Column labels as you like, and in the Values labels use the unique ID number.
Move the unique ID number (copy paste) somewhere to the right and use vlookup to load the data you need using the ID as reference.
It is a bit longer way but for me it works perfectly to combine values as you like in any moment.
hope helps.
Regards,
Jon
Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.
Good Day. This is exactly what i have been looking for. However when i try it on my pivot table or even when i try to recreate this exercise using the sample worksheet, i get this error:
"Microsoft Excel cannot use the number format you typed. Try using one of the built-in number formats."
Same thing here, Excel quite did not like the format in my PowerPivot. Any clues as to what may be going on? Thanks.
I have the same thing happening on my end. I'm running a normal pivot table on a .xlsm file.
@Danzi
What format did you use?
can you post the file ?
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C
MR.A CFVDE2458T
MR.Z AAVCR12548C
MR.X AAAAC1254T
MR.Z AADCD245T
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C 1000
MR.A CFVDE2458T 2000
MR.Z AAVCR12548C 5451
MR.X AAAAC1254T 45564
MR.Z AADCD245T 4500
how to get pivot tabe so i get PAN no. against Name.
I found an easy way to get text values in pivot table.
I create an other worksheet in wich each cell has a formula that copy the pivot table. The trick is that the formula does a lookup for the numbers in the pivot table.
The formula looks like that:
=IF(ISNUMBER(table!A1);VLOOKUP(table!A1;Code!$A$1:$B$65;2);IF(ISBLANK(table!A1);" ";table!A1))
Code is a worksheet where there is a liste of text /numbers correspondance.
As a bonus The new sheet is easier to format
Additional trick:
In my case, i encoded differents codeid with a power(2, codeId-1) so that summing then is equivalent to concatenate them.
1-A
2-B
4-C
8-D
yields :
5 - AC
14 - BCD
Hi
I want to ask if pivot can display dates in pivot field. As in a column i have customers and in row different items i want to know there last purchase date. anyone help in this??
Hello Guys, Need your help
I am doing some analysis of the cycle time of the product i.e how much time a product takes from manufacturing to the central warehouse.
I have batch numbers for the product and against them i have to pull out the diff. dates
Like the base date is from where the manufacturing start. So i have the batch number,against it's manuf. date. Now i have to pull out the date when it was quality released.
I have the quality released data but the data have duplicates, like i will have two dates or may be three for the same batch. So my main objective is to pull out the date which is latest among them.
BATCH NO. DATE of Mfg. DATE of Quality release
A1 12/4/2014 (HERE I HAVE TO PULL value)
Next Sheet
BATCH NO. DATE of Quality Release
A1 14/5/2014
a2 23/5/2016
A1 12/5/2014
A1 13/6/2014
From this sheet i have to pull up the latest date format of date here is dd/mm/yyy
TIA
[…] needed to present text instead of counts in a pivot table value column. Here is an excellent resource for Excel manipulation, in addition to an overview of pivot […]
This is great thank you.
Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.
I am developing training tracking sheet for 200 employees with training completed date. Each employee will be attending 25 courses. How to indicate actual dates in pivot table value field.