ALK you mean send my course notes? It's all on paper in the particularly scanner unfriendly top spiral non-letter size format as well.
TLHS - I wouldn't say I do a lot of template calculations, I'm not generally doing full designs, but I have one spreadsheet where the majority of my calculations reside, and pieces and parts can be re-used, along with some lookup tables for steel sections, rebar areas, etc. I may not save time for one-off calculations, but it does feel like it saves time. Or if it doesn't it feels better anyway. I mean I can't exactly clone myself into a parallel dimensions and run time studies.
For me, the big ones are related to input controls. Radio buttons, drop down menus, etc. When I'm trying to build a standardized template calc for my team to use, I want to be able to guide them and let them know when they're outside the guiderails. (And let's be honest, nobody reads text warnings).
You can kind of hack some form of that together with MathCAD comboboxes, but it's incredibly clunky and limited.
SE2607 - yes, the 'vlookupinterpolate' function is pretty neat. Though there documentation for spreadsheet functions is pretty bad. They'll tell you what inputs you need, but not what they should be. I guess they expect you to just look at Excel's help docs to figure it out?
I've spent a couple of weeks evaluating Maple Flow. They've tried to take Maple and adopt the parts of Mathcad that are popular. I like the concept and permanent license. It is a bit rough at this point, though. Apparently, it's a relatively new product.
Overall the experience reminds me of going from MC to Smath. I used MC a lot for about 10 years, up to v13. When I got to Smath, it just felt clunky and was awkward enough to bug me. Maple Flow feels like that. Several very common actions like making a letter Greek or adding units take more steps. It also fatally and inexplicably locked up a couple of my worksheets, which are gone forever. The Help is relatively sparse.
There's a lot of good features. Basically a lot of what MC does well. Just clunky at this point. I'm planning to check back next year and see if they've worked out the bugs.
I like Calcpad, but I know python and HTML so it was super easy for me to pick up. I had a question about the integration function and I emailed the developer, they got back to me within a day or two. One of the negatives with calcpad is the plotting/graphing capability - It sucks.
As soon as SMath started online accounts, I got wary and started keeping previous versions of the .exe files. It's how I'm protecting my investment of time and effort into re-useable templates. Am I mistaken in my understanding that SMath's core features are still free and only various whiz-bangs cost money?
On the licensing front, I have this link saved with the old .exe files:
it gives me license to use the the software without restriction. I suppose that so long as I prove that I used it prior to September 2023, I am good to go? That's my story and I am sticking to it!
It combines code, results and graphs into one notebook, that you could probably export to pdf. There is quite a ecosystem revolving around it. It's open nature seems makes it promising.
A decade ago I was using someones custom python -> sympy -> latex solution where you use plain text python to write your report and formulas, and some script translated the formulas to evaluated latex (pretty looking formulas) and then to pdf. Looked pretty neat, but still felt a bit hacky.
I still have a giant itch to build something like this myself. I have dozens of prototypes in python and excel. We're all solving the same problems over and over again. Why isn't there an indexed list of all our work. A couple years ago I stumbelled upon a mathcad book implementation of Roarks Stress Concentration book. All the roark formulas neatly ordered, catalogued and working mathcad sheets.
There used to be and still might be; Mathcad Prime's PTC user community board used to have worksheets posted by users, with a lot of them being structural-calc related
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
