The guided wave field excited in a plate‐like structure from any weakly coupled transducer can be calculated from the superposition of the guided wave fields due to a number of suitable point or line excitation sources. In this paper, the fields from various point and line excitation sources are reviewed and relationships between them are demonstrated. The performance of pancake coil EMATs is modeled using the superposition of the fields from point sources and the results compared with experiment. © 2004 American Institute of Physics