Vector addition using Excel 2

[Ralph2]

As our shop balancer I am often required to combine weights. For 25 years I have relied on a DOS program from IRD to accomplish this. Now, with a recent upgrade to Windows7 my DOS program no longer works.
Something very easy to do on polar graph paper is proving beyond my skills to accomplish in Excel.
Are there any Excel gurus that would be willing to tackle this..

What I need is:
Column A Amplitude (units do not matter); Column B Angle (from 0 to 359 degrees)
Then several rows down the sum of A and the resulting angle. This row (sums)could be at the very top which would eliminate the variable amount of rows to be summed (i.e. sum the entire column starting from row 3)

Please.. anyone?
Thank you for your time.
Ralph

 

[electricpete]

attached.

=====================================
(2B)+(2B)' ?

 

[Ralph2]

Thank you for having a go at this. It is exactly what I want... except. Somehow it needs an "if" statement to correct the negative values, adding 360 to a negative value should do it.. I think
If I add 20 units at 90 degrees and 30 units at 270 degrees the result is 10 units at -90. It should be 10 units at 270.

 

[electricpete]

Updated to your preferences that angle falls between 0 and 360 by using mod function.
I also removed the protection (the idea of the protection was to make sure you only input into the green cells). If you want to see the formula's, unhide columns D and E

=====================================
(2B)+(2B)' ?

 

[zelgar]

If you want, DOSBox will let you run your dos programs in Win7

http://www.dosbox.com/

 

[Ralph2]

Thank you very much ElectricPete. This is exactly what I was wanting I had unprotected and looked at your formula in column D and E tying to see how it worked.. Still don't understand it but have something to study. It always amazed me that something that was so simple with paper and pencil was (to me) impossible to get my $2K+ computer to figure out. Thanks again.

Zelgar.. I have been advised of dosbox before and have thought of trying it on my home computer to see if it would work here. Work is a bit paranoid about installing third party (internet)software. I did get our IT department to set me up in the MS VirtualPC mode with WindowsXP but my DOS program insists on running in a full window and.. for some reason will not run on XP in this mode. I don't have that much faith in our IT guy but he was struggling for several hours to.. first, change the BIOS to allow VirtualPC and WindowsXP to run.. then to get my DOS program to run.. before he gave up. I left before he did so I do not know if he has totally given up or is still pondering it.

Thanks all

 

[DRWeig]

Ralph2, have you already tried the Windows 7 compatibility selection for your program? It has saved my skin a few times. Nearly every issue I have had like yours has been resolved by changing compatibility settings and, occasionally, also setting the program to run as an administrator.

The settings go all the way back to Win 95.

Best to you,

Goober Dave

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[Ralph2]

Thanks DRWeig
I have tried that in as many of the options as is available on the compatibility mode. For what it is worth.. I will attach the files (zipped)if someone wants to play with it. The programs on it were given to me at an IRD balance course back in 1993 ish. Run the balance.bat to start the program.
Let me know if anyone is successful.
Thanks to electricpete the problem has been solved and I have copied his work into my Balance Trivia spreadsheet.

 

[DRWeig]

Yes, electricpete is a good fellow.

I see that your old programs' trouble is being reported as incompatible with 64-bit systems. That is very unusual, I have only encountered it once before. But that program was really old too.

As a challenge, I'm going to hand your file to my son, he has access to some really old machines and he is skilled at making old things compatible with new. If he has time to monkey with it and gets it fixed, I'll post it back to you for nostalgia purposes.

I sure do miss seeing the old C> or C:\ when I booted up a computer. I think DOS 3.3 was my favorite, the versions after that got just too darned fancy.

I made myself feel old a bit ago in a political forum by referring to John Kennedy and realizing he died 49 years ago this coming Sunday. Might as well do it again. The computer I miss the most is my first one -- a Radio Shack TRS-80. It just absolutely was the best. I bought a serial interface that fit up inside an IBM Selectric typewriter (with the jumping ball type carrier) and my TRS was the first word processor in my city. The Selectric cranked out pages like mad, almost 25 per hour. A 90-minute TEAC cassete could hold dang near a 100-page document. It took only 90 minutes to save and 90 minutes to retrieve. The TRS Text Editor wasn't too friendly, but I became an expert at it after a few months.

Good memories. Computers and I were both young then.



Best to you,

Goober Dave

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[Ralph2]

Thanks.. for the nostalgia. My first computer was an apple II clone, a Franklin Ace, it ran the CPM operating system with Wordstar and VisiCalc. If.. your son get that DOS program to work.. that would be nice, but I have an alternative now so it like so many other programs are destined for the archives.
I agree with things are now too fancy, I spent the last 3 hours trying to do things with Excel 2007 that I had no problems with in 2003. All those menu ribbons that I have no use for and the ones I want are hidden.. like the developer tab.

 

[ScottyUK]

Dave,

My first WP was the EVE editor running under VMS on a DEC VAX cluster. I was quite adept at manually inserting the printer control codes for bold, underline, italic, etc. Things were better back then. Well, they probably weren't in any quantifiable sense but life was a lot more fun in those days.

Ralph,

Yes, the new layout which arrived in Office 2007 sure is different. Last time I got this frustrated with my computer was when Win 3.11 was superceded by Win 95. And even then I could understand the networking stuff... in Win 7 I can't even find it...