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)