Check that you have the Quicktime extension installed in the System
Folder, and that you have a movie player such as Apple's "Movieplayer"
available.Then:-
1) Start up Excel V.
2) Drag down the TOOLS Menu and select "ADD-INS". From the Add-Ins
menu select MOVIEMAKER. A new entry, CREATE A MOVIE will then appear at
the bottom of the TOOLS menu. You will only need to do this once - hereafter,
the CREATE A MOVIE option will be automatically loaded.This would be a
good time to review the help file on making movies, which can be found
in the "Using Microsoft Excel" help file. (Accessed through the ? button
at the top right hand side of the tool bar). Use the search facility and
look for "Moviemaker".
3) Create the spreadsheet that you wish to graph, organising
it so that the x values are in the first row, and successive rows contain
functional values y(x,t) one row for each successive value of t. If the
x values are in a regular monotonic sequence, evenly spaced, select the
line plot in what follows; otherwise choose the xy plot option. For a line
plot, ta first row may be inserted containing labels for the x axis, and
similarly a first column may be inserted containg labels for each frame.
In the case of an XY plot, the first row should contain X values, and the
first column may contain labels for each frame. You will be asked to specify
the contents of the first row and column, ie labels or data, at a later
stage.
4) Highlight the whole block by dragging over it.
5) Select CHART from the INSERT menu, and then "As New Sheet"
from the options presented.
6) A CHARTWIZARD window will appear with the first of five steps:
Step 1 just repeats your selection definition. Step 2 lets you choose the
plot type. Line plots and xy plots are the usual choices for scientific
work. Step 3 lets you choose the sub-type. However, it is often a waste
of time selecting anything other than the first option for the sub-type
(labelled 1) - even though the chart may come out as expected, the movie
will default back to type 1. One partial exception is the option 10 for
line plot, which results in a movie with smoothed lines but still with
plotting symbols. Step 4: A preview graph will appear. Choose "Data series
in rows", then if the first row contains x values (xy plot) or x axis labels
( line plot) select n=1 in the option "Use first n rows for Category (X)
axis labels" of a line plot, or "Use first n rows for X data" for an xy
plot. Similarly, if there are labels for the y data in the first column,
select n=1 in the corresponding box, otherwise set this to zero. This label
will be printed in the legend on each movie frame as a description of each
set of y data. Do not panic about a huge legend box blotting out the graph
- when the movie is made, just one legend entry will appear on each frame.
Step 5 lets you add a title, and labels for the x and y axes. You can change
these later if you want to 7) Under INSERT menu, use "Text" to attach
or change labels on axes and a caption if desired. You have a choice of
fonts and sizes. Several other insertions can be made under INSERT as well.
8) However, by far the most useful way to edit the graph is
simply to double click on any feature: labels, axes etc. You get lots of
self-explanatory choices of scales, fonts, sizes, alignment, patterns etc.
One important choice at this stage is autoscaling - usually one wants to
dispense with it and use manually selected maximum and minimum y values;
otherwise the movies end up being difficult to follow if the scale changes
between frames.
9) When happy with the chart, go to the TOOLS menu and select
OPTIONS. Choose chart from the folder which appears, and cross the box
labelled "Chart scales with window size". This lets you control the size
of the final movie frames by dragging the chart window to whatever size
you want. (Without crossing this box, the movies can be too big to fit
in a screen.) You may also want to save the current chart format using
the bottom boxes available in this window - this means that you can use
the current chart format as a default option for future graphs - it will
appear when under the FORMAT menu you select "Autoformat".
10) Under the VIEW menu, choose Full Screen, and then size the
frame as you desire for the final movie. The storage requirements scale
with the area selected.
11) Do a dummy OPEN under the FILE menu so as to organise in
advance the folder into which the forthcoming movie will be stored. (You
don't get the chance to do this in the actual movie creation step!) Don't
actually open a file, just open the required folder and then cancel.
12) Choose "Create a Movie" under the TOOLS menu.
13) Select ONE SERIES AT A TIME. Give the movie a name when
prompted; it will be saved in the current folder (see 11 above). You can
choose the replay speed. When Excel has finished, close the chart and spreadsheet
windows, and quit from Excel if desired.
14) The movies can be replayed using Movie Player (which can
play several movies simultaneously; quite useful for comparisons), or any
of a number of equivalent players (Simple Player, Peter's Player etc);
even Word V has a simple movie-playing capability.Trying to determine what
Excel V does and does not do when creating movies has been very much a
try-it-and-see exercise, since the documentation is not very helpful, and
I may have overlooked some features.