Trigonometry & Geometry with Spreadsheets

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• For a curved retaining wall you convert degrees to radians, take the sine correctly, calculate arc lengths, and turn surveyed bearings in degrees, minutes and seconds into decimal degrees.
• Find ramp angles with ATAN, rafter lengths with COS, ridge heights with TAN and ladder angles with ACOS for Ridgeline's building jobs.
• Calculate the plan and slope distances between surveyed points from their coordinates, close the boundary back to the start and check whether a foundation corner is square.
• Measure a river's width from one bank with the law of sines, find a missing fence side with the law of cosines and calculate a roof-truss angle from its three sides.
• Calculate the area of triangular plots from their three sides with Heron's formula, the floor area of regular polygons and the area of circular flower-bed sectors.
• Estimate the capacity of a cylindrical water tank and the paint for its outside, the weight of a conical gravel pile and the volume of a spherical gas tank.
• For the marina at a coastal building site you turn time into a phase angle with MOD, model the water level with a sine wave, chart 24 hours of tide and find the time of the first high tide.
• Split the five legs of a survey-drone flight into east and north components, add them to the resultant distance from base, find its bearing with ATAN2 and plot the track.