Folks,
Unfortunately spreadsheet programs store complex numbers as text, meaning one can't truncate to a reasonable length and so the cells all overflow. For Excel there is some lengthy Basic script to fix this but not for OO.
Anybody know a trick how to get them into scientific notation with, say, four decimal points plus the exponent, for the real and for the imaginary part?
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
I haven't tried it but the text seems to indicate that it switches to scientific notation as needed.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
That's the function I am using but it will not react to any cell formatting attempt.
When I revisit the cell after a formatting attempt it says that it is scientific but in reality it is not. I still see -7582.6508947528j in there just like before and this spills over into the neighbor cell.
Thing is, I can probably fix this in Excel but these days many people aren't using that anymore and I need to keep things compatible. Which is a real pain because OpenOffice can't do a lot of the things, for example there's no VBA.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Doing complex in *spreadsheets*?
Euuhgh...
If you "simply cannot" do it in any other scientific scripting language, say MATLAB/Octave, or just write it out in any programming or scripting language, like BASIC (or, say, VBScript), Java, Python..), then...
Why not do all the ugly calculation stuff on a separate sheet, and pretty-print it for human eyes on a different one? I'd suggest REAL(x) and IMAG(x), in adjacent cells, with your desired formatting, including -- which I note you didn't press your luck to ask :) -- powers-of-10^3 engineering notation, which was more-or-less solved recently I believe.
Tim
-- Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com "Joerg" wrote in message news:b054b8Fm70fU1@mid.individual.net... > Folks, > > Unfortunately spreadsheet programs store complex numbers as text, > meaning one can't truncate to a reasonable length and so the cells all > overflow. For Excel there is some lengthy Basic script to fix this but > not for OO. > > Anybody know a trick how to get them into scientific notation with, say, > four decimal points plus the exponent, for the real and for the > imaginary part? > > -- > Regards, Joerg > > http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Well, I've considered using the matrix formulation for complex numbers, i.e.
Z = A + Bj = ( A B ) (-B A )
and doing add/subtract through matrix addition, multiply with matrix multiplication, and division by matrix inversion followed by multiplication. That way, you just have the result cells in floating point (and use the usual display-as-fixed to get a fixed decimal point representation).
Can't you just extract the real and imaginary parts, to a pair of display-only cells?
I know engineers who successfully and efficiently simulate large chunks of engines using nothing but Excel and VBA. The output nearly has scientific publication quality.
I have Mathcad but the problem is nobody else in the group does. Same with the others. And I am not a programmer.
That is the ugly path which I am taking right now, in order to get on with the calcs. But it isn't the ultimate cat's meouw because nobody can then edit in the "pretty sheet".
For power of 03 there is a bug in my OO version, it won't do that either. Maybe a new version would but that doesn't bother me much.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Perhaps try LibreOffice instead?
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Works as expected in Libra Office: including formatting the text. I can't split the result into real and imaginary to make it look pretty but good enough methinks.
-- Jeff Liebermann snipped-for-privacy@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D
multiplication,
Could be done that way. But why does OO have all these nice functions to handle all sorts of complex number math, down to calculating the hyperbolic secant and whatnot ...
... and then can't do the rather simple thing of formatting the cell?
cells?
Right now I am doing a display-only page. But that makes it tough for others to check and maybe edit my work.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Methinks LibreOffice is actually OpenOffice. If I key in a number like you did it comes out the same way. But if the numbers inside the brackets are actually results from other cells with full length it blows apart.
You can do the test: Key in "=COMPLEX(123.123456,-456.789;"j") and then format cell A1 to only display two positions after the decimal point. Or scientific, or another style.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
It's based on OpenOffice.
Argh. It doesn't work. No matter what formatting, including a custom format, it shows the full complex number. I can change the font size and style, but nothing else.
Looks like grinding the numbers on a seperate "sheet", splitting the result between real and imaginary, and displaying it in two seperate cells, is the only way to format complex numbers.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Scilab is another free application that could work for you:
Yup. Which means it is fairly useless. I have no idea why the team put so much effort into all the complex math libraries, considering that results cannot be displayed in a consistently clean fashion.
Yes :-(
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
While there is no VBA in OO, VBA macros written in Excel will run on an OO spreadsheet, a bit slow, but they do work, at least in OO version 3.
-- Regards, Adrian Jansen adrianjansen at internode dot on dot net Note reply address is invalid, convert address above to machine form.
Correction:
Actually I meant Libre Office 3.3, not the older Open Office.
-- Regards, Adrian Jansen adrianjansen at internode dot on dot net Note reply address is invalid, convert address above to machine form.
Thanks, Adrian. Maybe it's time to update then, VBA is very useful.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Mighty close, it is a fork in the development. IT looks like it may re-merge someday soon as well, since OO got moved over to Apache.org.
?-)
Don't you mean:
A -B B A
??
--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
(Richard Feynman)
becuause spreadsheet cells can't hold complex numbers, only floats, expresssions, and text.
and the text formatting isn't smart enough to convert complex-number-text to fit cell width.
display-only cells?
checking spreadsheets is already too tough to rely on.
-- ?? 100% natural --- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---
Mostly, except Oracle doesn't constain libreoffice development.
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