Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 1, Mapping Your Life

#11 How Far? How Fast? Geo-Enabling Your Spreadsheet

HACK

latitude is 69 miles. But since the lines of longitude converge at the poles,

the distance between degrees of longitude decreases as you move toward the

poles. The screen capture of the Function Examples worksheet shown in

Figure 1-20 demonstrates this.

The

posDist( ) function suggests possibilities! Excel has useful tools for

importing and processing text files, which I use to prepare tracklogs and

waypoints for further analysis. In the worksheet titled small track, you’ll

find a sample of a small, cleaned-up tracklog:

Lat. Long. New Seg. Flag Dist. (yards) Cum. Distance

33.81252778 -117.9163028 [1];

33.81255 -117.9163444 [0]; 15 15

33.81256944 -117.9161944 [0]; 46 61

33.80877222 -117.9145861 [1]; 0 61

33.80862222 -117.91465 [0]; 58 119

Importing GPS Waypoints into Your Spreadsheet

GPS waypoints and tracklogs come in a number of common formats. I used

the Garnix program

[Hack #49] to load my tracklogs and waypoints from my

GPS. Here are the raw waypoints as returned from Garnix for the various

Disneyland train stations:

33° 48' 35.98" -117° 55' 7.72" 41.0 WGS84 DTRNGATE "" [wpt_dot N];

33° 48' 39.50" -117° 55' 18.55" 39.0 WGS84 DTRNNEWORL "" [wpt_dot N];

33° 48' 53.51" -117° 55' 6.29" 54.0 WGS84 DTRNTOONTN "" [wpt_dot N];

33° 48' 45.45" -117° 54' 56.76" 55.0 WGS84 DTRNTOMORW "" [wpt_dot N];

Each line starts with