This is a simple application I wrote in Excel to help me light my rotating beacons.  Previously, I manually entered all the position
values after I had determined visually and by hand what they should be.  This was a little tedious and worked fine, but I got off slightly
on my last locomotive.  Rather than keep reentering position data each time I did a rotating beacon, I decided to write this program.
It does contain a macro, but since I don't have a digital signature, you might not be able to enable it on your system.  By the way,
you need Excel to use this program.  Even is you disable the macro, you can still go into your VBE editore and look at the macro.
It's very simple andstraight forward--It asks for seven pieces of data and puts them in the proper locations.  The only difference if you
enter the data manually is that you must put the data in the proper locations for the rest of the sheets to work correctly.  I used thirty
degree increments on my beacon, so there are 12 different states for this light.  Taking these thirty degree increments and using cosine
functions I developed formulae that compute the X and Z positions for a revolving light.  I purposefully left Y as a constant.  Then using the X
and Z positions I produced a scattergram that shows the center ofthe beacon and the 12 lighting positions around it.  I then got bold and 
decided to use the concatenate function in Excel to let it write psoition data for the lighting code for the .eng file. After putting it to the
test, I found that it actually worked.

I opened my .eng file in wordpad and highlighted my old rotating beacon section.  I then switched back to Excel and selected the whole
code worksheet, made a copy of it and then returned to wordpad.  With my beacon section still highlighted, I went to the edit menu and 
clicked on "Paste Special" and "Unformatted Text" and click on "OK".  It worked like a charm, pasting in the new data.  OF course I had 
saved a copy of the .eng file before trying this, but it worked perfectly.  Now all my beacons will be made using this program.

This program is provided in the Public Domain as all the source code you need to manipulate it is in the program itself.  So feel free to
spindle, fold, bend, and mutilate to your heart's desire. 

DISCLAIMER:   And as always, you are free to use this program if you wish, but you do so at your own risk.  I will not be held responsible 
for any adverse action resulting from this program.  

If you have any questions, you can reach me through the locomotive design forum or at briansdad@netzero.net.