Today's podcast shows how to animate a scatter chart using just regular Excel.
The subject is the first four free flights of the prototype moon lander Project Morpheus. The Project Morpheus team is attempting to fly the lander 465 feet up and 636 feet down range today, significantly higher and farther than the last 4 free flights. Check out videos of Project Morpheus at Morpheus Lander
The subject is the first four free flights of the prototype moon lander Project Morpheus. The Project Morpheus team is attempting to fly the lander 465 feet up and 636 feet down range today, significantly higher and farther than the last 4 free flights. Check out videos of Project Morpheus at Morpheus Lander
Transcript of the video:
MrExcel Podcast is sponsored by KING'S DUCK INN Learn excel from MrExcel podcast. Episode #1856 Animating a chart over time without PowerMap (Project Morpheus) Hey welcome back to the MrExcel netcast. I'm Bill Jelen. I have a great science story for you today.
Today's Podcast takes place in Florida.
I'm going to zoom in here and Google Earth not just any where in Florida but at Kennedy Space Center.
And as we zoom in there a couple of things you might recognize if you're a fan of space.
These are Pads 39A at 39B where the space shuttle program happened for you know the last three decades and here's where the space shuttle landed when it landed at Kennedy.
But I'm going to zoom in even more than that as you know the space shuttle program is over and so at the end of the shuttle landing strip there's something new that popped up on Google Earth in the last year.
This is a very small Launch Pad right here and this Hazard Field is designed to look like the moon and there are some really cool science happening here.
So here it is the Morpheus lander. They take off from that Launch Pad and try and land it safely in the Hazard Field and today February 10, 2014.
They're trying free flight 7.
In honour of that today's Podcast is going to talk about how to animate a chart over time. Now of course you can do this with PowerMap but that's only if you have excel 2013 and who has excel 2013.
So I have here a chart that's going to show the last four free flights of Project Morpheus.
We're going to show both how high the flight went and how far it traveled wow.
It was up, so let's run this Macro first as you can see how it works and then I'll show you the details behind it.
So what we have is we have four different flights free flight 3 4 5 and 6 and this chart is animating the initial ascend where it takes off and reaches some sort of an altitude and each test has gone higher and higher and higher.
Then once they reach that altitude they have horizontal thrusters that can move the lander over that test field and they're trying to avoid the rocks and the craters and figure out a good place to land. so this one free flight 6 was the last one before today.
They went up to the height of the statue of Liberty and then out fair distance I can see that they went a lot further in free flight 6 than they did in 5 4 and 3, so there's our animated chart showing that both inaccurate time, so the flights lasted anywhere from 60 to 76 seconds. Shows the actual height and the actual distance travelled.
Down here I've taken those 4 bits and showing them separately.
Sometimes it's hard to see what's going on here. So that one of the flights I think was free flight 4 actually paused for a while, so let's reset. Will take a look down there So you can see here.
Where 5 and 6 were ascending much faster than 3 and 4.
4 actually pause there for a while and then started up again.
Alright, so an interesting way to show these very real events that are happening in time without having to use PowerMap at all. Let me stop that.
Alright, so the first thing first thing you need to do is just have a an X Y scatter chart, and I'll scroll down here.
You'll see that here is the data for the 4 free flights. The time, the distance and then the height alright.
So we build the scatter chart, that's the first part, but then to animate this.
Now we're taking advantage of the fact that if you hide rows in excel the data gets hidden from the chart.
So let's take a look at the VBA behind this. I'll do Alt F11 Alright and show position with trail.
So we go from second 1 to second 76. The time is updated and then we are unhiding that particular row so the data starts in row 55.
Unhide row 56 and then wait 1 second and then 57 and 58 and 59.
This one leaves the trail that shows what's going on.
There's also one that just shows the current position and in that case where we are unhiding the next row and then hiding the previous row, let's take a look at how that looks.
Alright, so here.
This is just showing the position of each of the 4 different launches in relation to each other and that's actually helpful.
You know for seeing that free flight 3 stopped here, when all 4 of them were leaving the trail it was tough to see exactly what was going on so there's going across.
Alright. Yeah, so hey the cool thing.
Check them out on Twitter. It's @MorpheusLander Probably today somewhere early afternoon, they're going to attempt free flight 7 where they're going to try to get up to 465 feet and out 636 feet. So definitely more awesome as they say really cool science happening at NASA with this Morpheus Lander check it out.
So hey you can watch today's test right from your desktop check it out on Twitter @MorpheusLander.
They're targeting 1245 Eastern time today.
They will usually tweet out a link for the live feed.
All right Well there you have it. Best of luck to Project Morpheus today and for everyone else check them out.
Check out their Twitter feed.
That's a great science happening there.
Well I want to thank you for stopping by. Will see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Today's Podcast takes place in Florida.
I'm going to zoom in here and Google Earth not just any where in Florida but at Kennedy Space Center.
And as we zoom in there a couple of things you might recognize if you're a fan of space.
These are Pads 39A at 39B where the space shuttle program happened for you know the last three decades and here's where the space shuttle landed when it landed at Kennedy.
But I'm going to zoom in even more than that as you know the space shuttle program is over and so at the end of the shuttle landing strip there's something new that popped up on Google Earth in the last year.
This is a very small Launch Pad right here and this Hazard Field is designed to look like the moon and there are some really cool science happening here.
So here it is the Morpheus lander. They take off from that Launch Pad and try and land it safely in the Hazard Field and today February 10, 2014.
They're trying free flight 7.
In honour of that today's Podcast is going to talk about how to animate a chart over time. Now of course you can do this with PowerMap but that's only if you have excel 2013 and who has excel 2013.
So I have here a chart that's going to show the last four free flights of Project Morpheus.
We're going to show both how high the flight went and how far it traveled wow.
It was up, so let's run this Macro first as you can see how it works and then I'll show you the details behind it.
So what we have is we have four different flights free flight 3 4 5 and 6 and this chart is animating the initial ascend where it takes off and reaches some sort of an altitude and each test has gone higher and higher and higher.
Then once they reach that altitude they have horizontal thrusters that can move the lander over that test field and they're trying to avoid the rocks and the craters and figure out a good place to land. so this one free flight 6 was the last one before today.
They went up to the height of the statue of Liberty and then out fair distance I can see that they went a lot further in free flight 6 than they did in 5 4 and 3, so there's our animated chart showing that both inaccurate time, so the flights lasted anywhere from 60 to 76 seconds. Shows the actual height and the actual distance travelled.
Down here I've taken those 4 bits and showing them separately.
Sometimes it's hard to see what's going on here. So that one of the flights I think was free flight 4 actually paused for a while, so let's reset. Will take a look down there So you can see here.
Where 5 and 6 were ascending much faster than 3 and 4.
4 actually pause there for a while and then started up again.
Alright, so an interesting way to show these very real events that are happening in time without having to use PowerMap at all. Let me stop that.
Alright, so the first thing first thing you need to do is just have a an X Y scatter chart, and I'll scroll down here.
You'll see that here is the data for the 4 free flights. The time, the distance and then the height alright.
So we build the scatter chart, that's the first part, but then to animate this.
Now we're taking advantage of the fact that if you hide rows in excel the data gets hidden from the chart.
So let's take a look at the VBA behind this. I'll do Alt F11 Alright and show position with trail.
So we go from second 1 to second 76. The time is updated and then we are unhiding that particular row so the data starts in row 55.
Unhide row 56 and then wait 1 second and then 57 and 58 and 59.
This one leaves the trail that shows what's going on.
There's also one that just shows the current position and in that case where we are unhiding the next row and then hiding the previous row, let's take a look at how that looks.
Alright, so here.
This is just showing the position of each of the 4 different launches in relation to each other and that's actually helpful.
You know for seeing that free flight 3 stopped here, when all 4 of them were leaving the trail it was tough to see exactly what was going on so there's going across.
Alright. Yeah, so hey the cool thing.
Check them out on Twitter. It's @MorpheusLander Probably today somewhere early afternoon, they're going to attempt free flight 7 where they're going to try to get up to 465 feet and out 636 feet. So definitely more awesome as they say really cool science happening at NASA with this Morpheus Lander check it out.
So hey you can watch today's test right from your desktop check it out on Twitter @MorpheusLander.
They're targeting 1245 Eastern time today.
They will usually tweet out a link for the live feed.
All right Well there you have it. Best of luck to Project Morpheus today and for everyone else check them out.
Check out their Twitter feed.
That's a great science happening there.
Well I want to thank you for stopping by. Will see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
