Re: Trig. on spreadsheets...

["Roger A. Pruitt" <phrp@fhsuvm.fhsu.edu>]

Leigh Palmer wrote:
> >        Greetings!  Our school computers (ibm compatibles) have MicroSoft
> > Works for Windows (version 3.1).  I would like to have my students do
> > some of their labs on spreadsheets.  One thing I discovered is that when
> > using sine, cosine, and tangent (or the inverses), I get the readings in
> > radian mode rather than degree mode.  Is there a way to get it in degree
> > mode?  We have been working with vector problems and I would like them to
> > turn in their lab papers that have been done on spreadsheets.
> >        Any help would be greatly appreciated!
>
> That's a very interesting problem. I couldn't find an easy fix in Excel,
> a closely related application. If you can define your own functions (or
> macros) perhaps you should write ones called "sine", "cosine", "arcsine",
> etc. which would do the conversions for them transparently. They could
> use those functions instead of the built-in functions.
>
> Leigh

In Quattro Pro one uses the @degrees(X) command. In place of X put your 
mathematical operation. Of course one can always convert an answer in radians 
to degrees by multiplying by 180 and dividing by pi.

Roger