## [Polar Plots Using Excel Radar Chart](/content/blog/polar-plots-using-excel-radar-chart/index.html)

10/14/2015

Excel is a great tool for engineering data reporting due to its widespread use. However, it has never supported a _good_ polar plot which is an essential plot type in multiple engineering disciplines, including acoustics.  The major workarounds I’ve seen are to either download a plugin (which is difficult if you don’t have admin rights) or convert (theta,R) into x=R*cos(theta) and y=R*sin(theta) and use a scatter plot. However, the latter method can take up a lot of spreadsheet space -especially if you have multiple sets of data.

It turns out the chart type that you always thought should be able to plot a polar – the Radar Chart – CAN do it; however, there is still some frustration with the formatting of axes. Thankfully, if you work through the frustration once and save the completed chart as a template, it’s much easier to reuse future data sets. See the below attachment for instructions using Excel 2016. There are some differences with older versions, but hopefully you can follow along also...

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| **iar-_polar_plots_in_excel.pdf** |  
| File Size: | 493 kb |
| File Type: | pdf |

[Download File](/content/uploads/4/7/6/7/47670341/iar-_polar_plots_in_excel.pdf)

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