Trigonometric functions

If you are someone who likes mathematics it will be useful for you to know that Excel has a lot of trigonometric functions, and we can use them whenever is necessary to plot your sinusoids. These are the functions of SIN (sine), COS (cosine), TAN (tangent), COT (cotangent), and there are many others as well. If you are curious you can easily find them in the Excel function library. How to draw a sinusoid?

This will be shown on the example of the functions for calculating sine and cosine. We will create a table with several columns, and the first one contains the values of degrees. They start from zero, and then in each subsequent row we add 5 degrees until we get to the number 360. Trigonometric functions have only one argument, which is the value of degrees in radians. To calculate radians you can use a function which has a syntax:

RADIANS (<value>)

So, in B2 we should enter a formula:

=RADIANS(A2)

Instead of RADIANS function you could have multiply column values with PI()/180, the result would be the same. To calculate sine and cosine you can use functions:

SIN (<value>)

COS (<value>)

So, in cells B3 and B4 we should enter formulas:

=SIN(B2)

=COS(B2)

Next, you need to copy the formulas into the remaining cells in the table.

Further we need to select the first, third and fourth column. Go to the Insert ribbon and then select the Scatter chart and its variant Scatter with smooth lines that approximates points and draw curves. In a few steps we got a graph showing the value of sine and cosine for the given values. Now it’s still necessary to set the x axis to get values from 0 to 360 degrees, edit the legend, apply some of the styles… As a final result we’ll get the desired chart.