Google Sheets has all kinds of built-in functions that can help you perform trigonometric calculations.
For example, if you need to calculate the inverse tangent, the ATAN function can help you do this quite easily.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to use the ATAN function to calculate inverse tangent in Google Sheets.
Table of Contents
What is Inverse Tangent?
Inverse tangent is the inverse function of the tangent. It is also called arctan or arctangent.
I’m not going to go into too much detail on the formula for inverse tangent in this post. Instead, we’re going to use the ATAN function in Google Sheets to do this.
ATAN Function
The ATAN function in Google Sheets will return the inverse tangent of a value in radians.
The syntax of the function is:
=ATAN(value)
- value – this is the value that will be used to calculate the inverse tangent. It can be a value itself or a cell reference containing a value
- The function returns a solution between -Pi/2 and Pi/2.
Here is an example of this function would be used in your spreadsheet:
You can see the function only takes one argument which is the value used to calculate the inverse tangent.
If you want to convert your returned value into degrees, you can do so by combining it with the DEGREES function like this:
=DEGREES(ATAN(value))
Here is how this would look in your spreadsheet:
Closing Thoughts
The ATAN function makes calculating the arctan or inverse tangent incredibly easy. Once you have the value that you are calculating for, you can perform the function in a matter of seconds.
There are many other useful functions to help you with trigonometric calculations, but we will cover those at a later time. We hope you found this article useful!
More Google Sheets Tutorials:
How to Do Basic Math Formulas