Excel is not really the right tool for something like this (IMO). What you
are wanting to do is mutli-dimensional data modeling within an OLAP cube.
Essbase, Cognos or MDX would probably be the best. You could (probably)
however get away with querying Access from an Excel Pivot Table...

--
HTH...

Jim Thomlinson


"Milo" wrote:

Hi,
I wonder if Excel is the right app for this. I'll try and be brief.

I have some aircraft data: latitude, logitude, height, time/date and a
crucial number called vertical acceleration in m/s (call it VA). I have this
data for 40 aircraft spanning 10 years and so the number of these records is
several million.

Now, I would like to set up a multidimensional structure where I can view
histograms of VA for any height band (say 9000 to 10000 feet) for any
month/year for any aircraft for a particular latitude/longitude square (say 2
x 2 degrees).
I was thinking in terms of multiple workbooks (one for each aircraft) and
multiple sheets in each workbook, a sheet one for each month where each sheet
would contain lat/lon height columns and rows would contain numbers of VA
occurances from which the VA histograms could be built.
How fast would such a structure be if I wanted to sum over several years for
a particular number of aircraft for a given height band, month and location
and come up with a histogram?
Put simply is this feasible in Excel?
Any suggestions welcome, Milo.