Best way to create Spreadsheet 5

[Juan1990]

I am new here. And Im searching for group that can help me become the engineer I wanted to be. Honestly speaking I am not that good as a student when I was in college. Right now I am working as a Formwork Design Engineer in a private company. Unfortunately, my superior resigned and now I am the only designer our company has. My company although its started way back in the 90's is still not that good in terms of technicalities but we are handling million dollars projects and I want to improve our Design and analysis of formworks. I wondering if what software I can use to create a simple design calculations for our formworks. I hope someone here in this group can help me.

 

[BulbTheBuilder]

I think you answered your question yourself with "spreadsheet". You can create an excel spreadsheet to handle your calculations if it's going to be the same over and over.

However, I will recommend you first try to understand the concept and math behind the calculation of formwork. First thing you'd want to look at is loading and load path as formwork design is very critical. I personally don't design formworks, so I don't know much about its but its calculation is crucial. You can ask around a good book for formwork design.

I am new here. And Im searching for group that can help me become the engineer I wanted to be.

Everyone is really "nice" if you ask the "right questions". Nonetheless, everyone is helpful and ready to be of service. You'd have to do a bit of reading yourself and come here for clarify (that's my personal opinion).

Honestly speaking I am not that good as a student when I was in college

I wasn't the best student in college as well. I have been trying to read 2 hours a day and have seen great improvement in my skills even though I have barely been in the industry roughly just a year (something just to motivate you )

 

[dhengr]

Juan1990:
As a starting point for some good reading and study, try..., “Formwork for Concrete,” by M. K. Hurd, Pub. by ACI, ACI Committee 347. Also, find yourself a good mentor who will help you learn the ropes. This is pretty serious engineering for someone inexperienced to be doing alone.

 

[TLHS]

I really think that unless you really need the tabulated nature of a spreadsheet, they're actually really bad for engineering calculations. They don't lay out information in a way that makes it easy to understand what's happening with the math, and they're hard to document.

Previously I would recommend MathCAD. The free one is fine if you don't mind it sticking a watermark on everything and you don't need the programming parts of it. However, I picked SMath up again recently and they've fixed the part that really bothered me. You can now format the text however you want instead of having all math in Courier all the time.

SMath is a free MathCAD like solution. It's basically like laying out a hand calc, but the computer does the calculating part and handles all the units. There's a bit of a learning curve to figure out all the shortcuts, but I can use MathCAD and SMath significantly faster than I can operate a calculator or run a spreadsheet. It's also a 'portable' installation that doesn't need admin access to operate on a computer. You should be able to install it as a standard user on a work machine in a lot of environments.

You can make a standard calculation, save it, and then just update the inputs in the future the same way you would with a spreadsheet, but all the calculations, annotations and narrative are there.

https://en.smath.com/view/SMathStudio/summary

I also really really like the 'snippit' bit. You can save sheets that are parts of a calculation and insert them into sheets as sections. It's just a more convenient copy/paste. But being able to have 'Simply Supported Beam' or 'NBCC Load Cases' as ready to insert calc puzzle pieces is pretty nice.

Beyond computers, though, I think the biggest thing about setting up good calculations is narrative. It's not really a thing that gets taught, and a lot of people don't really do it, but it's the difference between really good calculations and adequate calculations. Your document should explain your thinking. Tell a story with them. Write a short paragraph at the top that explains what you're trying to do and how you're going to do it. Explain what the parts of your calculation are doing. Explain why you're taking the conclusions you are from the output or why you're going a certain direction. A few sentences here and there make a big difference.

It does a couple of things. Firstly, it forces you to actually think about what you're doing. Writing out your reasoning forces you to examine it. You will catch things. Secondly, it makes the work significantly more checkable. The time you spend documenting it will save a bunch of checking time. Thirdly, clients and third party reviewers will be more likely to understand and more likely to follow your thoughts. Sometimes you just want to submit bare minimum calculations to meet regulatory requirements, but if you're trying to prove something to people, a narrative will make it much more likely that they'll follow and that they'll trust you. Fourthly, you'll be able to figure out what the heck you were doing in two years when a client hires you to modify the thing, or when you want to copy and paste the work for another project.

 

[TLHS]

Your spreadsheet layouts are pretty good. A couple of things to note:

I don't know what code, standard or references you're using. Having that at the front is important.

Explain what you're doing. The drawing clips are super helpful, but what are you calculating and why? Which parts are you looking at. What elements are the different parts of the calculations looking at?

Where do the formulas come from? If you're grabbing from a bunch of places, specific references for equations is helpful. If you're following a common reference and it'll be obvious where they're from you can maybe not stress quite as much.

'OK' being bright red with three exclamation marks makes my brain confused. The exclamation marks make me think something's gone horribly wrong . That might just be me though.

But yeah, the way you're doing your work is much more in line with a MathCAD/SMath workflow than a spreadsheet. You're working down the page one equation at a time. If this is the way you want to approach calcs, they'll be much faster.

 

[Juan1990]

Thank you guys. I will read books in order to improve my understanding and calculation on formworks. Right now I design base on those previous projects thats already done. Like for example the spacing between secondary support or primary support.

 

[Juan1990]

Thank you so much for your efforts to comment on my post. I really appreciate it. I am very excited right now feels like I will learn so many things in this group. The group is very much alive and active. I feel like I'm surrounded by Engineering great minds. I really like science and engineering eversince but my brain cant handle so much.lol

 

[rb1957]

I strongly suggest that your employer replaces the lost staff (rather than relying on you). This is not a "snipe" (an attack on you) just the reality that you (as you say yourself) don't know enough to be responsible for the calculations.

"Hoffen wir mal, dass alles gut geht !"
General Paulus, Nov 1942, outside Stalingrad after the launch of Operation Uranus.

 

[MotorCity]

"way back in the 90's".....hearing that makes me feel old. It wasn't "that" way back, was it?

I'm an Excel spreadsheet guy, but I do see the power in programs like Mathcad.
Kudos to you for self improvement.

 

[jjl317]

I second the review of "Formwork for Concrete" from the ACI - excellent document

And while I am not sure where in the world you are located, I might recommend looking into more of the product specific documentation provided by the various manufacturers. Here in the US, most manufacturers provide various design guides and load charts, which greatly simplify the design process. Plus, these are often based on test data, which can provide a more accurate capacity than theory.

I would also recommend trying to get out on the jobsites - the differences between what you are thinking they will do and what they are actually doing are often way more important than what the calculations say.

And personally, I prefer the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) style of programs like MathCAD, as it can eliminate the questions about what is hidden in the cells - though looking back - TLHS's description above is way better than mine.

Good luck

 

[Brad805]

It might be worth looking into coding options long term. Anyone doing the same general tasks day in day out can save a lot of time by programming all those logic steps into your own tool. Look at what member Celt and Agent666 are doing. I have been doing this for some silly repetitive tasks lately and I wish I would have kept learning programming eons ago.

 

[skeletron]

Best way to create spreadsheets? Learn how to use Excel's "Cell Styles" and use named variables. Eventually learn how to use some VBA or Lambda functions to simplify any loops.

That sheet is begging for a SMATH, MathCAD, or python (HandCalcs) format though. Only because it would validate. There's also no harm in having one tool (SMATH, MathCAD, or python) as the validator and foundation for a similar second tool. I would make the second tool an Excel sheet geared towards tabulated data solutions.

 

[SkipVought]

If you go the spreadsheet route...
Check out member IDS

https://www.eng-tips.com/userinfo.cfm?member=ids.

He's got a web site with lots of engineering examples.

Check out our sister site,

http://www.Tek-Tips.com

Specifically for Excel spreadsheet solutions:

https://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=68

Specifically for VBA solutions in Excel:

https://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=707

Document your spreadsheet/VBA profusely.
Keep DATA in tables, NOT in formulas or code.
Learn to use INDEX & MATCH for lookups rather than VLOOKUP.
Learn to use Named Ranges and Structured Table names in formulas & code.

Skip,

_{Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance!}

 

[fel3]

I second the motion for Mathcad or SMath. Excel is fine for certain things, and I use it a lot, but engineering calculations like this one really demand a Mathcad/SMath approach. I use both Mathcad and SMath, but I use Mathcad far more often due to my company's software policies. Right now, I only use SMath at home.

With Mathcad/SMath, you get units handling (helpful it you are trying to not crash a spacecraft into Mars ), visible equations that are easy to read, much easier root solving, programs, more robust matrix handling, and a bunch of other useful things that Excel doesn't do. Also, understanding an old Mathcad/SMath worksheet that you haven't touched in a while is much easier than with an old Excel spreadsheet. This is especially important if you need to modify the calculation for a new project.

On the other hand, Excel spreadsheets generally require fewer pages than a Mathcad/SMath worksheet and Excel has much better graphing tools, the ability to use conditional formatting, and a bunch of other useful things that Mathcad/SMath don't do. Fortunately, Mathcad (and I think SMath as well) has tools to send data to and from Excel. So, you may want to keep massive data tables in Excel, read the data into a Mathcad worksheet, then export the results to Excel for graphing.

If you have to submit calculations to a client or a reviewing agency (something I do fairly often), they will be able to understand and trust a Mathcad/SMath worksheet, but very likely not the equivalent Excel spreadsheet. The same principle applies to when I mentor/train young engineers. They have a much easier time understanding a calculation by reading a Mathcad/SMath worksheet, even if they aren't Mathcad/SMath users themselves. I am slowly converting my many Excel design spreadsheets to Mathcad, partly for this purpose. In fact, for many routine calculations, I maintain both a Mathcad version and an equivalent Excel version. I usually use the Mathcad version myself and it's what I teach with, but the non-Mathcad users get an Excel spreadsheet to work with, although I always encourage them to create their own tools because that's how they will learn it best.



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"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill

 

[Juan1990]

Thank you so much for all your inputs.

 

[BridgeSmith]

I use Excel all the time for engineering calcs, and find it very useful. I suppose if I started using Smath, MathCad, etc. I might like them, but I haven't.

My number one piece of advice for using Excel is don't put any input values (this includes pretty much all actual numbers, except formula constants out of the spec) into a cell with calculations - Keep your input cells separate and reference them or name them. I also denote those input cells with filling them with a light color, so I can tell at a glance the cells with values I may need to change when reusing the calcs for a new design.

Rod Smith, P.E., The artist formerly known as HotRod10

 

[Denial]

Juan1990.[ ] You seem to have a slight leaning towards spreadsheets.[ ] I have a strong leaning that way, but mainly as a result of my employment history.[ ] At one stage I found myself attempting to set spreadsheet "standards" for our engineers who wanted to develop their own spreadsheets.[ ] Since ceasing full-time work I have continued to develop spreadsheets for use by others, and I have continued to evolve my "standards".[ ] I will attach a Word file that describes the standards I currently attempt to apply to myself.[ ] [I note that BridgeSmith, in his post above, advocates using a faint colour for cells that contain a problem's input data. This is part of my "standards" too, and I am surprised how seldom such a simple and effective tactic is used.]