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,
24 Responses to “10 Supercool UI Improvements in Excel 2010”
The best improvement by far is the Collapse Ribbon ^ button !
Kind of a shame that some of the best improvements are actually returns to old functionality. One thing I don't like is that to get to recent files I need to do an extra click after File - apart from Save As, that's why I'm usually in the File menu. I like the sparkline options, though they are still as not fully featured as some of the free and pay options out there.
The collapse button for the ribbon menu is good news. Can you make the ribbon menus stick too?
Nine improvements, not ten. You can also select multiple objects in 2007. Click on the Find & Select item at the far right of the Home tab, and the dropdown looks remarkably like your 2010 screenshot.
@Jon.. Thank you. Dumb me, I somehow thought we couldnt select objects in Excel 2007. Just saw the "select menu" and it is there. I have corrected the post and removed the point. I have added the "you can make your own ribbons" instead. Thanks once again.
@Arti: what do you mean by make ribbons stick?
@Alex: May be it is my installation, but when I go to "File menu" I see "recent files" by default.
For example, if I am working with one of the contextual ribbon menus (Pivot tables, Drawing/Chart etc), as soon as I click away from the selected object, the menu tabs vanish. If I click on the object again immediately, then Excel will remember what I was looking at, but if I wander away and click on a Pivot, then back again on the Chart, the menus will 'appear' but not get activated, thereby causing much annoyance and additional clicking.
I want to "pin" the whole menu (not invididual commands) somehow, so that I can have the menu there for the length of the time I am working with graphics. Excel 2003 used to have the Drawing toolbar you could detach and hover while you were working, but this functionality disappeared in Excel 2007.
My thought was Excel should just allow a 'pin', similar to the Recently Opened files menu, for the Ribbon Menus as well. If I have not selected any Drawing object, the commands can be greyed out, but I want the menu as a whole to 'stick'.
@Arti... I think MS solved this problem differently. When I select a pivot and go to "design" tab Excel 2010 remembers this and automatically takes me to "design" tab when I reselect the pivot.
Apart from this you can also define your own ribbon with all the things you normally do. See the above article (I have added this after Jon's comments)
Nice feature. About time for a upgrade for MS Office
Oh... okay. That might be a start. I'd probably just copy-paste the Drawing tab haha. Thanks. I'll definitely give Excel 2010 a try.
Btw - have you considered getting into / gotten into the world of Excel as it meets SharePoint?
Actually, the replacement new thing is probably better than all the rest. One thing that the designers of the Office 2007 ignored was allowing regular users to customize their own interface. Office 2010's interface was expanded in this way to address the huge uproar.
Is there still a limit on how many things you can add to the QAT bar? (I'm too lazy to look myself.)
@Jeff.. it seems to take quite a few, but only shows one line and gives a little arrow button at the end. (summary: shucks!)
The best thing is you can edit the ribbon directly from excel, so now i can create my own bar with just the things I use regularly!
One of the annoying things in 07 for me is the Add-Ins menu bar - in 03 I could keystroke directly to menu add ins.. In 07 I needed an extra keystroke just to activate the add-in menu, then the keystrokes as normal.. Hope this marek sense..
John -
If you remember the old Excel 2003 Alt-key shortcuts, you can still use them in 2007. To get to the Add-In dialog:
Alt-T-I
Dear Arti & Chandoo
Seen your comments over some issues. Hope you are form India, gone through your comment expecting a pin to command it as a whole, great, hope if someone out of MS have read it, it may be kept in mind while the next R & D of Office Ver. 16
Just incase someone forgot CTRL+F1 will collapse the ribbon.
[...] was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my [...]
I like the sparklines, and the ability to modify the charts
How do you get rid of the advertisment on the right hand side? If you upgrade then will it take off the ads?
Once again Microsoft has re-decorated the Office and we are NOT pleased!
The graphics object selector can be found in the Home ribbon under Find & Select, Select Objects near the bottom of the drop down. You can make it part of the Quick Access toolbar by right click over it and selecting Add to Quick Access toolbar.
The graphics "cursor" will now appear on the mini-toolbar at the top left of the window.
How to get rid of "Add-Ins" button in Backstage (File)" menu by means of XML code, i.e. to hide, to delete or to disable this button?
This button is usually situated in the Backstage menu between "Help" and "Options" buttons.
Vladimir, did you ever get an answer to your question?
I am tying to customize the ribbon UI for a file using XML, and this is precisely the piece I can't figure out. I can hide other tabs, remove items from QAT and backstage - all except the options that are showing up under add-ins in backstage. If there is an XML syntax for referencing this thing and making it invisible, I cannot find it.
Hey, nice tutorial. Please check my video tutorial on similar topic at the below link and provide your comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIFc0jYjpA