A friend hooked me up with this neat little excel add in.
I was looking to modify my astro sheet to use state plane and convergence to get a grid azimuth from a star. And I wasn't looking forward to building all of that myself and if you use the COE TEC Excel beta, you know it needs the full conversion software on your computer anyway.
So, here is what I think is just the coolest little bugger.
Enter your northing, easting, and zone.
Now, highlight two cells for the result and go to formulas and find the excel add in.
Next, you pick the cells the formula asks for.
And, here's the sneaky part. Once you enter the cells as requested, you cannot just hit enter. It's a vector. So, you have to make sure the cursor is in the formula bar at the top of the screen and hit "Ctrl", "Shift", and "Enter".
And BAM!
Decimal Latitude and Longitude.
Now for the disclaimer.
Three decimal places in meters is a millimiter and five decimal places in decimal degrees is 0.3 millimeters. The answer I got in the first test disagrees from the NGS conversion by 0.00001 in both Latitude and Longitude when converted to DMS.
Do I care?
Not at all.
Here's where you can find this (and other neat) Excel add ins;
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~renshaw/geogtools/
Ooops, had a typo in the northing.
My eyes can't read my own hand writing anymore...
NGS vs Excel add-in;
Doesn't CORPSCON have something like this now?
Yes and no.
You mjust have the entire software on your hardware for the excel to work.
This simply requires an excel add in.
Scott ?
How easy is it to change SPC systems?
As in are all US systems in via a pulldown or must you re-enter all parameters to change? I typically use PA N, PA S and NJ.
Also I use Open Office Spreadsheet. When I get to it I'll let everyone know if it works.
Paul in PA
Scott ?
All you need is the coordinate in meters and the zone code.
Three cells.
You don't have to change anything except the input in those three cells