Suppliers of Manufactured structural products (MSP) and manufactured structural building products (MSBP), seem to have desires for software to help them sell their product. However their desires are scuttled by a need for something they call engineering, and a limited understanding of their product. Product Overview A steel section is an MSP, whilst a shed […]
Building a Structural (Engineering) Design eWorkbook – Part 7
So taking a look at the workbook primary data tables. The table comprises of fields: group, description, block Name, value, units, edit field, editValue, CalcValue, isParameter. Block name, is carry over from Quattro Pro where group of cells referred to as a block rather than a range. In the main it is just the name […]
Building a Structural (Engineering) Design eWorkbook – Part 5
So in part 3 I made use of various DBMS to store input data and calculated results. the data stored in tables, each row of the table is a record and each column of each record is a field. High level programming languages allow data structures to be defined collecting all the fields together into a […]
Building a Structural (Engineering) Design eWorkbook – Part 1
Introduction Actually from my viewpoint not engineering because: Engineering takes place at the frontiers of science and technology. It is a high risk activity, based on highly deficient knowledge, with uncertain outcomes. The thing we are concerned with here are established technologies, with an established body of technical knowledge, making planning, design and management based […]
Comparing Calculation Tools
As indicated in previous post I’ve been considering whether to move away from spreadsheets for my calculations. I have previously discussed the use of MathCAD and similar software versus the use of spreadsheets on my personal blog in the post: Electronic Calculations (eCalc’s) . In the previous article my focus was protesting against those who consider […]
Using AutoCAD LT as a simple Geographical Information System
For a simple geographical information system (GIS) not concerned with complex projections of the surface of a sphere onto a 2D surface, nor concerned with features of the landscape such as rivers, lakes, coast lines, mountains, nor with technological features of the built environment such as roads and bridges. The primary requirement is being able to locate a […]
Using Spreadsheets for Engineering Design
The spreadsheets I have released both here and over on ExcelCalcs are all in MS Excel 2003 format, and in the main are dependent on an MS Excel spreadsheet add-in (.xla). As a consequence of this “add-in” the spreadsheets are not usable in OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Further as a consequence of the hardware failure of […]
Abstract Data Structures in VBA
A collection of MS Excel workbooks using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to experiment with abstract data structures. Includes: stacks, queues linked lists binary trees. Download: dataStruct.zip With binary trees used to represent a bill of materials (BoM), with single level BoM’s being used to expand or explode the complete BoM for an assembly PreviousProgrammingNext […]
Experiments with VBA Class Objects
A collection of MS Excel workbooks, illustrating the use of VBA classes and objects. Includes classes for point coordinates, and material and section properties. Download: vbaObjects.zip PreviousVBA ProgrammingNext PreviousSpreadsheet BundleNext
Spreadsheet Automation Using VBA
A collection of spreadsheets providing simple introduction to office automation using MS Excel and VBA. The focus is reading and writing files, and generating scripts for Acad LT. One of primary programming tasks in engineering design is taking data from one application program and changing for use with another application. Having done that also useful if can […]