Welcome to the magic world of Excel animation!
– All the animated models are created using plain MS Excel and VBA.
– All the Excel files and PDF tutorials can be downloaded from BLOG page.
– All the downloads on this site are FREE and there are hundreds of them.
Hello!
Finding engineering work quite unchallenging lately I decided to start this blog in which to share cool ways of solving engineering problems or just interesting modeling of natural phenomena in MS Excel 2003.
I use cell formulas and VBA in order to take advantage of the ease of “programming” and the native speed of the Excel spreadsheet.
My name is George Lungu and I am the author of this blog. In my daily life I am a circuit designer.
Why bother with this blog?
1. It’s science, it’s physics, it’s electronics, mechanics, games …you name it. You could also suggest future directions of development
2. Engineering is coming back in force and it will rule again. Lots of people nowadays want to either manage or market that’s why we need more engineers.
3. It might be boring at times but it’s very useful stuff. I will give it a sugar coating by producing “live” models with at least some catchy animations and sound effects
4. You can understand most of it with just a high a school background. No computer language is necessary. A little visual basic (VBA) will be involved but you’ll learn that on-the-fly. We do search Wikipedia occasionally here but as a last resort.
5. If you follow this and begin to model your own ideas with your own methods you could build some real understanding of engineering. School is good for acquiring discipline and a background, but only you can teach yourself deep knowledge by personal experience. Learn by having fun!
6. This blog it’s just a lure. The best and most effective teacher lives inside you.
7. The most important aspect: no matter what you want to do, start by thinking and experimenting before reading or asking someone else (no matter who).
Trust me on this one, you are far smarter than you think (if you dare to use your mind).
One month of continuous pondering and experimentation will get you farther than a year of school.
Learn slowly, speed is a big spoiler. The traditional education system is built on speed and superficiality.
“External teachers” were taught one thing: compliance. And that’s what they will teach you.
Trust your “inner teacher” instead. You won’t be disappointed.
Why Excel?
- Excel is cheap and and you can find it everywhere.
- It’s a good environment to do complex programming without being a programmer. It gives you the feel of of a bread board. A donkey could use it…
- As opposed to regular programming languages, Excel is a two-dimensional programming canvass
- Excel has decent built in graphics (I like using 2D scatter plots)
- As a 2D matrix calculator, Excel it’s wickedly fast
- Excel has decent GUI capabilities within the program itself
- Programming in Excel gives you more understanding of physical processes than “black box” type programs such as Matlab, Simulink, Octave since in Excel you build everything from basic formulas
All right, Excel, but why versions to use?
2007 is slow and bugsy. While most of the models should work in most versions, if one is serious about speed, Excel 2003 or earlier is a better choice. In terms or charting speed the new Excel is about 10 times slower than the old Excel (see a 2008 study here). By the same study, with 1023 MB of RAM, the Excel 2007 Line charts take 15 to 22 times as long to redraw as the Excel 2003. The recalculation time is also slower in the new Excel, but only by about 30% (study).
And why Microsoft?
I have to admit that for introductory scientific modeling, Excel is a great overall choice out there. Though I am not against product evolution, I decry the drop in speed (mainly charting speed) in the last versions of Excel. And by the way, while Open Office “Calc” is alright for filling taxes, it is about one order of magnitude slower than Excel for large calculations. I admire the open-source initiatives though.
https://www.mail-archive.com/users@openoffice.org/msg80893.html
Samy, Thanks. I am am average guy with an above average interest in gadgets, but very far from being an expert in Excel. The thrust of the site is actually prototyping various ideas (Excel is very handy here). Microsoft needs programmers and corporate “yes-men”. I seriously doubt I can easily fit in that organization. All the best! George
You are a genius. Microsoft shud hire people like you instead of there useless website and all that crippled help files.
Great work man..God bless you
Kudos to you, George. I’m known as an Excel guru, but to be as good as you in Excel, that is still a loooooooooooooong way to go and probably out of my reach. I realise that I am called a guru because the majority of mankind is completely unaware of the possibilities of Excel and/or don’t bother to invest some time in it. I’m really impressed with what I see here.
Eddy
Thanks Eddy! I am trying to get away from this Excel mark and do just applications. I don’t intend to be seen as an advanced Excel user but rather as a dedicated hobbist happening to use Excel.
Hi George,
I have a about 5000 above record in Excel
and i want to delete duplicate record in this list….
I use remove duplicate option in Excel 2007 but that is not correct working
some duplicate data cant delete,
Please tell me Macro for delete duplicate data …
I have a macro for duplicate data, but not correct working … missing some duplicate data.
Please reply me ASAP,
I am waiting .. ..
Saleem, I am not sure how to do that. It must be easy using VBA and you can search mrexcel.com forum for that. Sorry, I am very busy nowadays with a contract I am working on.
Thanks for the prompt response George. Yes, I do plan to post further – I am working on using Excel for FIR filter analysis.
Best wishes,
Nitin
Hi George,
This is a fantastic website, your work is fascinating!
I run an Excel site for engineers, driven by similar work as yours. See http://www.Engineers-Excel.com
Thanks again for sharing your great work.
Best wishes,
Nitin
Sorry that should have been
driven by similar motivation as yours.
🙂
Hi Nitin,
I checked out your site. Good stuff but keep posting! Use what you have there (spectral analysis for instance) to develop more applied examples.
All the best, George
Im using Excel 2007 and have a table of 3 colums:
Each Column gives a colours RGB values in numbers from 1 to 255.
I would like the 4th Column to display the color based upon the numbers in the first row, Please solve this problem.
Thanks and regards,
Do you mean something like for instance (57, 82, 186), or a different format?
Yes, Dear
A B C D
256 200 150 RGB Color
I am interested in simulating water hammer / pressure surge in pipelines due to sudden closure of valves. Is it possible in excel to give dynamic behaviour?
Khan, it absolutely is, but I’m personally not there yet. Fluid dynamics derived from basic principles will be a great goal for me this year. In excel you are still limited to the grid size and you won’t have very elaborate graphics but if you spend some time you can model your problem from basic principles and learn much more in the process than by using dedicated software. Remember, Excel is just a powerful “slide rule”, you are the computation engine. And you need almost no programming skills.
What an inspiration – well done! I thought I had done some cool things using (and misusing) spreadsheets, but you are orders of magnitude ahead. You exhibit great creativity and technical skill.
BTW, I have used Visicalc (Apple ][+ 1980), Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro, QuattroPro (with excursions to Multiplan and Supercalc) and finally Excel since about 1990. Used in a systematic and disciplined manner spreadsheets can be an excellent tool, never mind what critics say. My applications included chemical thermodynamics, mass & energy balances, process modelling, fluid flow, 1,2, & 3-D transient heat transfer through multiple materials in various geometries. In pre-VBA days we used self-modifying macros, which many said was a crime! For fun I’ve done a Turtlegraphics implementation, Spirograph on steroids, recursive functions, and… Probably the most complex spreadsheet I had understood and tinkered with before I saw yours is a 16 MB Planetarium (in German) – very cool.
Inspired by what you’ve done I might consider a spreadsheet to make 3D representations of Scalextric tracks. Software already out there treats the track sections as rigid but real track flexes and the joints are not perfectly square – it needs fuzzy geometry and some 3D plotting on a 2D chart. Compared to the complexity of what you’ve done, this should be a ‘simple’ spreadsheet, suitable for an overgrown kid.
Thanks for a brilliant blog and reading an old engineer’s rambling reminiscences.
Best regards
Wolf
Thanks Wolf for the great feedback. I am fairly new to Excel. I’ve been practically using it since 2003. I have many plans but now I just got a new job and I am busy with that. I however built an animated “buck” switching regulator model in Excel for work. It’s 1000 times faster than the Spice in Cadence. Of course there is some drop in precision but not too much. Some of the stuff you mentioned I want to try in the future. Keep in touch! George
Hello George. I am amazed by the capabilities of Excel, through their heat transfer simulation and random number generation, and I learn from you. Simulations of theories have tails? Greetings from Cali, Colombia.
Luis Parada E S.
Chemical Engineer
Ms. Industrial and Systems Engineering
Hola Louis! Thanks for the comment.