Using conditional formatting and the temperatures my ground heat sections through the ground can show the isotherms in nice coloured bands or, on another sheet with different numbers, the flux lines, also in bands of colour.

It would be helpful if I could get the two sheets superimposed one on the other - the best I can do at the moment is to print them both out on the same sheet of paper and then scan/photo that. A bit laborious and not too pretty either. Any ideas that a computer dummy would be able to take in?

here's a detail of the flux plot....... and of the isotherms. Floor slab is top left. Took me a while to find a way with a small enough file and where you could see the cell values.

Posted By: mike7It would be helpful if I could get the two sheets superimposed one on the other - the best I can do at the moment is to print them both out on the same sheet of paper and then scan/photo that. A bit laborious and not too pretty either. Any ideas that a computer dummy would be able to take in?

The formatting is based on the numbers right? If so create a third sheet and use the values from each of the other sheets to decide what colour the cell should be. Can't remember if you can do an and in conditional formatting but you could do the calculation in a cell on the third sheet then do the formatting on that value.

Scratched my head a bit here.
Not sure you can really combine isotherms (in °C = f(x, y, z) or K = f(x, y, z)) with heat flux (in J/s or W) into one cell as I suspect you will just be getting a circular reference.

What you could do is put the calculations in adjacent cells i.e isotherm in cell B3, D3, F3, B5, B5, B5
Then fill in the gaps with the heat flux i.e. C3, E3, G3, C6, E6, G6
You can do that easily enough with relative referencing in another sheet.
Means things are not in the exact right place (by the width and height of your cells and the scaling), but close enough for this.
Or you could concatenate the results into one cell, not sure how conditional formats works with that.
It works as long as you convert from text to numeric, but not very meaningful, and even harder to read.

I notice on my FEA package that they do not combine the two.

Thanks for your responses - very much appreciated. I think the answer is there in the excel formatting possibilities you have encouraged me to look for - I can see now there are many more than I knew yesterday. Simplest might be to add the whole number parts of the two values for each cell and colour according to the result being odd or even, giving a chequerboard result. Not so pretty but functional enough. In the fullness of time I hope to do something to smooth out the sawtooth appearance also.

One other question - I didn't know about screenshots. Instructions I found were to press PrtScn, and then presshold Ctrl then V to paste. Nothing happens if I do that. I'm on Windows10 - any clues?

Thanks Steamy
Making a bit of progress