Category Archives: Excel

Building dances to an earthquake’s beat

Posted on May 28, 2020 by

Adam Pascale from the Seismology Research Centre recently shared this animation (click on controls bottom right for High Quality and Full Screen views): … it’s from a building in the Philippines about 130km (hypocentral distance) from a magnitude 6.1 earthquake … Continue reading →

Posted in Animation, Computing - general, Newton | Tagged , | Leave a comment

New sort functions and sorting to groups

Posted on May 16, 2020 by

I first posted a user defined function (UDF) to sort spreadsheet or VBA data back in 2009.  Finally Microsoft have caught up, and Excel 365 subscribers now have two built in sort functions available: =SORT(array,[sort_index],[sort_order],[by_col]) =SORTBY(array, by_array1, [sort_order1], [by_array2, sort_order2],…) … Continue reading →

Posted in Excel, UDFs, VBA | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Getting near matches from a list with Python

Posted on April 19, 2020 by

To return a list of near matches from a long list of strings would be quite difficult in VBA (unless I’m missing something), but in Python it is very simple.  Here is the code for this operation, using pyxll to … Continue reading →

Posted in Excel, Link to Python, PyXLL, UDFs | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dancing Pendulums Revisited

Posted on April 12, 2020 by

I have previously posted on Dynamically Defined Dancing Pendulums, using the Strand7 FEA program to generate the motion of a series of pendulums of varying length.  I have now updated that video using the latest Beta version of the program (Rel … Continue reading →

Posted in Animation, Finite Element Analysis, Frame Analysis, Newton, Strand7 | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Stepping through Python code called from Excel

Posted on March 31, 2020 by

Setting up your editor to allow Python code debugging for functions called from Excel can be tricky, depending on the details of your editor and linking software, but using the Visual Studio Code Editor and Pyxll, this works for me: … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general, Excel, Link to Python, PyXLL, UDFs | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

More Python Traps

Posted on March 30, 2020 by

I recently posted on some Python Traps, focussing on code where changes in the values of sub-routine arguments were not reflected in the calling routines.  The reverse can also be a problem: if an array, a, is passed to a … Continue reading →

Posted in Arrays, Excel, Link to Python, Newton, NumPy and SciPy, PyXLL, UDFs | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

LinEstGap with non-linear functions

Posted on March 14, 2020 by

The LinEstGap user defined function (UDF) allows the built-in Linest function to be used on data with empty cells or hidden rows, returning results that agree with the chart trend-line function, which automatically ignores blank cells and hidden data.  It … Continue reading →

Posted in Arrays, Curve fitting, Excel, Maths, Newton, UDFs, VBA | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment