I agree with others that a) spreadsheets are a must and b) calculation time should be a good deal less than drawing development time on most new build projects. I'll add the following to what others have said:
1) From what I've seen, a profitable job usually goes out the door with many things going either unchecked or very roughly checked with the EOR hopefully making the calls as to what is truly important based on sound engineering judgment. This is something that SE's rarely admit to for obvious reasons but I believe it to be the truth. And an important truth at that. A senior engineer's fat cat billable rate is often more justified by what they skillfully don't engineer rather than what they skillfully do engineer. That, plus leverage-able industry relationships etc. For those purists here that may be in search of a witch to hunt, move along. I've passed no moral judgment on this practice here; I'm simply reporting on my experiences to date, considerable as they are.
2) When I wax philosophical about the various ways that my designs are completed and which are the most efficient, it's not actually spreadsheets that come out as the winner. Rather, it tabulated designs. Stuff like the CRSI manual for footings etc. To that end, I've taken to using spreadsheets to generate my own project specific nomographs and tabulated designs. In this way, I generate canned designs for a handful of desirable member sizes and then instruct everyone working on the project to limit themselves to those canned designs unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise. On certain kinds of projects, I've found that this speeds things up nicely. It also contributes to design uniformity across various project participants.
I like to debate structural engineering theory -- a lot. If I challenge you on something, know that I'm doing so because I respect your opinion enough to either change it or adopt it.
