Best / Easiest Structural Steel Design Software for big slabs

[manstrom]

I have used Ram Steel recently and I am not fond of it.

The projects that I am working on recently are large steel transfer slabs supporting wood construction. They have a variety of line loads, point loads, etc.

One problem that I am having is that the loads need to be assigned a name, then applied. So I would have hundreds of named load combinations. ON the other hand, when using Ram concept (for concrete) I can apply and easily edit line loads

Another problem with Ram steel is that the geometry (which is often complex) must be set up very specifically in a cad file, then converted to dxf. This has been causing a lot of issues.

I have resorted to hand calcs using a single beam program. This is accurate, but very time intensive. I am open to purchasing an easy to use steel program that works well with cad, is intuitive, and allows for loads to be easily entered and edited.

What are my options?

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

-R. Buckminster Fuller

 

[Guest262653]

Well, I use CSI's SAP2000 and I have no problems even with larger problems.
Normally I use their reference lines input method for the creation of the models, but we can easily setup an Excel sheet to edit the model database.