The spreadsheet IP.xls has been updated (previous post) with the addition of a function to find the minimum perpendicular distance from a point (or series of points) to a polyline: Pdist

=PDist(Line,Points)

Line is a range with at least two rows containing XY coordinatesof the polyline.  Points is a range with XY coordinates of one or more points.

Pdist returns an array of 3 values for each point:

The distance from the point to the nearest segment, and the X and Y components of this distance.

Open source code is included in the download file.

The screen shot below shows output from this function.

PDist output