I am calculating Euclidian distance between points in an Excel application, and also need to be able to specify the direction of the difference in two-dimensional location for each pair of points.
Does anyone know how to implement this in Excel?
Below is a simplified illustration of my current Euclidian distance calculation. I have two points, and calculate how far apart Point1 is from Point2. But I would also like to find the direction (in degrees preferably) between Point1 and Point2.
For direction, you could use the angle that the vector from point one to point two makes with respect to the positive x axis:
=DEGREES(ATAN2(B3-B2,C3-C2))
this will return a number between -180 and +180 degrees. The ATAN2
function is given by ATAN2(x,y) = arctan(y/x)
with the refinement that it returns pi/2 rather than a division by 0 error if x = 0 and also gives an answer in the appropriate quadrant.