Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Ted. Today, I'm going to show you how to use trig functions in Excel. I have a spreadsheet all ready here and what I have is the angles in degrees from 0 to 360 by increments of 15 and I'm just going to blow it up a little bit here and the important thing to know with the trig functions in Excel is that they want to have the angles in radians because that's more standard, that's more you know, more common a lot of times in trig depending on the application and the field you're in. So to change an angle from degrees to radians all you do is you say equals the angle in degrees times Pi and you don't have to enter in 3.14159. Excel actually has a function and it's nothing more than Pi and then open parentheses, close parentheses. It has no argument and then divided by 180. So there we go, 0 degrees is 0 radians and then we take that formula and put our cursor at the bottom right and drag it down and you can see, let me just make a few less significant digits. There we go, that's probably enough and we'll just scroll it down until we get to 360 and let's just do some checks here. 180, there we go, that's Pi, 180 degrees is Pi radians, 360 degrees is 2 Pi radians so everything seems right and then to enter in the trig functions, they're just as I wrote here in the column headings, the sin is just equal to sin and then the number in radians and the cosine is COS and then the number in radians and the tangent is equals tan and the number in radians. Okay, and then we just select those three cells and we just drag them down and it should copy the formulas down into all the way from 0 to 360 and once again I'm going to reduce the number of significant digits because that's too many. Now, notice something interesting, at 90 degrees the tangent is a, it doesn't like the number but that's because the tangent is equal to the sin divided by the cosine and the cosine is 0 so it's dividing by a 0 number. So it's infinite basically so it's not wrong, it's just an undefined number. So you can do the same thing with all the other trig functions, the secant and cosecant and the inverse trig functions and hyperbolic sin functions all the different trig functions are in Excel and feel free to experiment on your own. So I hope this has been helpful. I'm Ted and today I showed you how to use trig functions in Excel. Thank you for watching.