Electronic calculation production 9

[Agent666]

Hi all.

In the last couple of years I've seen an increasing number of businesses moving towards embracing producing calculations by electronic means. By this I mean rather than using pen and paper and handwritten calculations and scanning them in from years gone by, the calculations are for the most part typed out on a computer with screenshots taken from analysis programs or drawings. Alternatively with the advent of tablets and computers with touch screens someone can write direct to the screen.

I've always thought you lose something regarding understanding the thought process of the author of the calculations when calculations are typed out because it seems to take longer to type out formulas and mathematical calculations. So the calculations become more brief as people are pressed for time, and ultimately the calculations become harder to follow and understand based on my personal experiences doing peer reviews of these types of calculations.

Basically I've resisted making this electronic transition so far, but time has caught up with me it seems. Basically moving into a team that creates all calculations electronically and the expectation that I do the same. They primarily use Microsoft OneNote for this purpose. After the calculations for a design are finished they are printed to PDF and a header/footer added to the PDF with company banner and page/project numbers, etc and sent off to local authorities/clients etc.

So does anyone else have any advice or do all their structural calculations electronically that can give their take on it or offer up their workflow suggestions to ease my pain. I've been given a Surface Pro and surface pen, and to be honest I am actually quite liking writing on the screen, I'm just not sure OneNote is the best tool for storing absolutely everything to do with formal calculations.

So far I've noted the following in no particular order:-

1) handwriting on the screen is actually ok, ability to go back and easily amend previous calculations is fairly handy (like correcting mistakes or inserting an intermediate page or paragraph within a page without having to write it all out again.

2) I feel you only produce a 'final' calculation when typing out the calculation, you lose the design development part and flow through the calculation, like try this beam, fails for some reason, then try this size and show it works. I like seeing how someone arrived at the final decision.

3) As I understand it the OneNote 2016 app is being retired in about a year in favour of the Windows 10 version which seems to have far less features. The others in the team seem oblivious to this, but I see it as a major roadblock with the workflow as they are quite different programs.

4) OneNote is primarily a note taking application, needing to jump through hoops to get for example a printout of a spreadsheet in there (if its multi-page spreadsheet then it gets even harder (see next point) seems really messy). You're basically forced to almost take a screenshot of Excel which is pretty messy solution, if you have a low resolution screen they invariably end up looking like garbage comparable to a 12 year old school project. I feel for the most part it was never designed to print out a PDF to scale from a OneNote page. Half the time despite writing within the margins it seems to cutoff text and throw it on a section page. Seems like OneNote with the default infinite canvas is all good and someone thought as an afterthought 'hey lets throw in some templates for different paper sizes' without really making it work seamlessly.

5) OneNote only allows a single page of text per 'OneNote page', no multiple pages of text in one 'OneNote page' if you want to print it out nicely at the end.

6) So far I've been mostly writing on the screen trying to follow my previous workflows rather than typing everything out. Most of my colleagues seem to be typing everything out as far as I can tell. This seems really inefficient to me, and because of the complexity of writing out math equations like this people seem to only write the final answer so you miss out on all the intermediate working which seems a recipe for introduction of calculation errors.

7) putting screenshots of drawings or code provisions and marking them up in the calculations is really easy, beats busting out my scissors and tape.

8) Tried using bluebeam, but the pen support seems to be lacking, pen just seems clunky/slow and sometimes causes you handwriting to glitch out at which point you have to press undo like 10 times just to delete the last word you wrote.

9) Importing a PDF printout into OneNote to write over is dead easy, however there seems no way to print it out again to an updated PDF with any markups given the infinite canvas of OneNote. Doesn't work with the one page rule above for example.

10) is there an app out there that is better suited to calculations than OneNote?

Anyway interested in your thoughts/experiences/suggestions.

Thanks

 

[Settingsun]

How do Mathcad and Smath handle the re-use of parameter names? Eg Beam A has depth D and breadth B, beams B and C also have those parameters but with different values. Do you have to use unique names like D,A and B,A or do the calculations use the most recent value assigned so all beams can just use D and B?

 

[IRstuff]

It's whatever you want; once you name something, it exists as whatever you assigned, or re-assigned, to it. As a matter of style, in a complex worksheet, having unique names avoids inadvertent errors in values if you forget that you used a variable in some forgotten context.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[KootK]

It never occurred to me to use Onenote for calculations. I'll check it out.

I'd originally intended my system to be MatchCad Express as the primary editor with sketches and screen clips dropped in as needed. You know, the ubiquitous dream of a live, master calc file. It's evolved into something else though.

Instead, I use Bluebeam as my primary editor and bring in MatchCad as PDF pages or snapshots. I find that Bluebeam is just a superior PDF document manipulator in many respects and, for me, that trumps everything else for efficient calc production.

My master calc document is no longer live but that's proven to not be that much of a sacrifice. I retain the live versions of the MatchCad that gets clipped into Bluebeam so updating things later is pretty painless.

This is my street fighting, time is money, solution to calc production at present.

 

[Ussuri]

I was looking at alternatives to excel and Mathcad a while back, and found this new start up software called Coda.

It markets itself as a new type of document, a combined word processor/spreadsheet and reading the information it seemed promising, kind of like free form spreadsheets in a document. However, its in the early stages and can only be viewed on Chrome so I wasn't able to take it any further.

Some others might be able to scope it out.

https://coda.io/welcome

 

[Craig_H]

I personally use a mix of Excel and Mathcad. I find that I use Excel for uber-repetetive design checks where the calculatiion template rarely needs tweaking, and the frequency of runs on the template justifies the time investment. I find that developing good templates in Excel is time-intensive; it can be difficult to 'show your work' in a concise way, due to Excel's structure. I also find that it takes a good amount of effort to validate an Excel calculation tool when creating it, due to the rabbit hole of cells that can be linked by formulas. For calculations that require more tweaking from project to project, or that I run less, I use Mathcad. I can easily grab pages of 'script' from a previous project, tweak the inputs, and be at 60-70% of complete in minutes. It does a better job at showing the work than Excel, but does have difficulty in crunching large amounts of data.

Overall, I find that the largest benefits to these digital-native calculations are:
- No errors in unit conversion. We switch back and forth almost continually up here in the Great White North.
- Incredibbly easy iteration, albeit without a record of those iterations.
- No complaints about my chicken scratch.

I personally see the benefit of being full digital (ie: editable), rather than just using a tablet as a very expensive ream of paper.

 

[IDS]

It never occurred to me to use Onenote for calculations. I'll check it out.

Let us know if you find it anything other than frustrating and annoying . (To be fair, my current experience may be coloured by the fact I'm using a new computer which has issues with my Office 365 subscription).

As for how I do things; I have design report templates in Word into which I copy images of FEA models where appropriate, and summarised output and calculations from Excel, copied using Copy as image. The output is in graph form, and the calculation summaries are usually a single page.

I'll have a look at Bluebeam though.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[AaronMcD]

Excel all the way. Love spreadsheets.

As mentioned above, all variable input gets it's own highlighted cell, often a description, sometimes code reference. It's as much for my future self as the plan checker. I usually add info and equations I don't need just to cover other aspects I might need next time. Then I save the spreadsheet in my engineering folder.

I use CAD for anything that needs sketches. Sketching on CAD is faster and more accurate than by hand anyway. Usually I use CAD plans to reference beam calcs, and track gravity and seismic loads, which can get confusing with all the factors - Omega ratio, rho, ASD/LRFD ratio, 20% capacity increase for members receiving ASD omega loads, etc. That way I don't have to shift from calc mode to drafting mode. It's all there on a different layer.

http://www.hellodwell.design

 

[Agent666]

I don't think the issue is Agent not wanting or knowing how to use these other tools, it's that the design office they are now in more or less requires the Onenote workflow.

Yeah kind of, I'd use something else if there was a 'perfect tool' for this sort of thing, but it doesn't quite seem to exist.

I like Onenote, super easy to paste from Bluebeam and annotate to my hearts content. Handwriting support is great, pen feels very natural. But it's not really suited to inserting PDF printouts from Excel. Can't really live without this and don't have the time to jump through hoops to workaround the limitations. After having now tried the automated calculations in Onenote, I can confirm I'm not a fan. Because every time you change soemthing you have to delete the previous answer manually and hit return again after the equals its super easy to leave leftover incorrect answers (but people still seem to use it with mixed results round these parts). Can't say I'll ever rely on it for anything but adding two numbers together.

Word shares the same excellent pen support, but PDF printouts need to be added in later or use workarounds like the SVG image insertion I noted above.

Excel has the same excellent pen support for inking, and will apparently be getting support for writing formulas with a pen in cells at some point, not sure how that will play out.

Tried SMath a while back and while it has potential, I cannot turn my back on Excel given my heavy use of VBA historically and Python more recently. Once Microsoft add native support for Python it opens up a world of possibilities .... one day I hope.

Used Mathcad years ago and found it to be very buggy compared with Excel at the time, gave up on it in favour of Excel (see above)

I like Bluebeam, probably have it open 90% of the time, but it's pen support can't match Onenote or Word (I did solve the odd behaviour I noted above in the original post, but the pen support just doesn't compare to the responsiveness of Onenote). PDF support and markup tools and measuring tools are second to none. The fact you can have markups defined on layers and turn them on and off at will and categorise markups onto certain layers is super useful.

The dream tool is somewhat of a crossover of Bluebeam with great PDF support for inserting/combining PDF printouts, working on a page by page basis as your calculations will eventually be printed to PDF. But with Onenote like support and tools for dealing with handwriting and text/formatting capability of word. Add in words ability to push text and markups onto a subsequent page and I'm sold. Once you get used to the pen its all very intuitive in Onenote/Excel/Word, but not so in Bluebeam.


Thanks for the opinions/advice.