Milo,

For what you want to do this sounds very much like a database. A few million
rows is not a problem in a db, but is in Excel.

Once you data is in a database, it becomes quite easy to generate queries
into Excel, and to use the charting engine in Excel to generate your end
product.

It would go something like:

SELECT VA FROM MyDataView WHERE AircraftID = 1 AND (Altitude Between 9000
AND 9999) AND MONTH(RecordDate) = 1 AND YEAR(RecordDate) = 2006 AND
(Latitude BETWEEN 180 and 182) and (Longitude BETWEEN 180 and 182)

Doing that in Excel would take an awful lot of logic if split across
multiple sheets.

To get you started it looks as if you are looking at a table structure like
this (in SQL):

CREATE TABLE aircraft_records(
AircraftID NOT NULL,
RecordDate NOT NULL,
Altitude NOT NULL,
VA NOT NULL,
Latitude NOT NULL,
Longitude NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT
pk_aircraft_records
PRIMARY KEY(
AircraftID, RecordDate))

Robin Hammond
www.enhanceddatasystems.com

"Milo" wrote in message
...
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.