Excel - Adding and Graphing Sine Waves with Any Amplitude or Phase

At Level 3 or HNC Electrical and Electronic Engineering you'll be asked to add sine waves together and graph them. You'll possibly also do this in AS or A-Level Maths.
Excel makes the process so much faster than using a calculator to find the sine of angles with or without phase shifts.
This video shows you how to create a dynamic graph of sine waves that changes as you change amplitude and phase data. It's saved me loads of time in the past.
For what it's worth, you can also type 'cos' or 'tan' instead of 'sin' to find the Cosine or Tangent functions.

I do it my way, but you could also type...

=sin(radians(x angle in degrees)+radians(phase shift in degrees)) [Enter]

Don't forget the = sign for Excel formulas and don't forget the two $ signs to force an equation to look at just one cell's data for all rows of the formula.
Happy graphing!

[sorinmarinescu]

Great info. especially when you added that degrees had to be changed to radiant. I just love it when people give out the important info at the beginning. Thanks,

[romellojayathilake]

Thank you for this great video! This helped me big time!

[scottybuenites]

Incredibly useful, thank you very much.

[deldridg]

Hi James - if it's of any interest or use to you, I've created a simple "Wave Generator" Excel spreadsheet that adds 40 sine waves to the original (40 harmonics) and have set it up with preset parameters to create: sine, square, sawtooth and triangle waves. You choose your shape from a dropdown and enter the number of harmonics you want, from 1 to 40 and it plots them. I'm amazed at how few harmonics are needed to get very decent approximations. You can easily add other shapes to the calculations. Anyway - if you're interested, let me know and I'll email to you. Cheers from Sydney - David

PS. You give very clear explanations and I look forward to exploring your channel! 🙂

[stevemiller]

HI James - If I had a data set that already forms a wave pattern how could I add your amplitude and phase shift example so I could manipulate my data?

[stevemiller]

I have a couple questions. Is there I way I could email you to discuss the scope of my project