How to make a Galaxy Map with Excel From: M22367@mwvm.mitre.org Date: Fri, 20 Mar 1992 14:39:34 +0000 It wuz me! :) I'm using Excel 3.0 under MS Windows. I usually download the turn reports and use an ASCII editor (PE - I wouldn't be without it) to chop out the non-coord stuff and file all the planet infor as GALx.TRN. Start Excel and open GALx.TRN Highlight a group of planet info (one column only) and select DATA PARSE Click the GUESS button and then the OK button. Excel does the parsing for you. It's best to do this process in chunks of 20 lines or so, since some people use extremely long planet names and it can throw off the parsing. Once all your planet data is parsed, select the X+Y data, FILE NEW CHART, X Y scatter chart with the first column used as X data. At the chart, FORMAT SCALE on the Y axis to display values in REVERSE order. Now comes the nasty part - labelling the data points. I couldn't find a neat way to get Excel to understand that I wanted to use values in a third column to be used as labels on my chart so I wrote a macro to do it. Here it is: Labeller =FOR("counter",1,117) =ATTACH.TEXT(4,1,counter) =FORMULA("='gal4_30.xls'!R<1>C1") <-- *square* brackets around the row number =ACTIVATE("gal4_30.xls") =SELECT(,"r<1>c") <-- *square* brackets around the row number =ACTIVATE("gal4_30.xlc") =NEXT() =RETURN() Substitute the names of your spreadsheet and chart. The number at the top of the loop should be the number of data points (+1 for slush). My terminal is not displaying square brackets, but substitute square brackets for the angles. The '1' in the square brackets means 'the next row', so make sure you select the cell *above* your first planet name before you run the macro. BTW - this macro should be run from the chart. If anyone knows of anything more elegant, puhleeze let me know! - Mike (Tintin, Galaxy Game 4) Up