Engineering template for new engineers (avoid writing VBA) 3

[chadspen]

Inspired by the book "Excel for Scientists and Engineers: Numerical Methods" by E Joseph Billo, I created an open-source engineering template, once and for all. No prepackaged calcs here, just pure numerical functions (Newton, ODE, etc) to build upon.

Also, the template includes an interesting new concept, called SOLVEWITH. Instead of writing VBA for your numerical calc, you can solve one instance of your problem in Excel. Then you call SOLVEWITH(out, in, new_in) to tabulate additional results. Sound impossible? It almost was...I had to register and execute callbacks in VBA to make it possible. However, the result is something kind of magical yet still logical. Does SOLVEWITH replace VBA? Probably not, VBA is huge and extensive. But for common numerical purposes, it could.

propel.codeplex.com

Thanks. This is an early version, so I'd be happy to hear your feedback.

P.S. The template also includes an early beta, VBA-less method for graphics (limited to checkboxes, radios, arrows, buttons, etc). Just select the cell(s) and hit Ctrl-W. For tables with hundreds of these objects, it's definitely faster and already quite stable.

 

[IDS]

Sounds interesting, but why the desire to not use VBA?

Surely we should be using the best tools available, which if you are working with Excel is very often VBA.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[IDS]

To be a bit less negative, there really is a lot of interesting stuff in there, and I'm sure I'll be using some of it in the near future, so thanks for making the code open-source.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[chadspen]

I have nothing against VBA, actually. For those that use Excel day-to-day, they'll definitely gravitate towards VBA.

However, as a practicing Engineer with access to Matlab, I didn't use VBA too much (once every ~4mo as project required). Since VBA has a huge API, I personally found myself forgetting more of the API than I retained. Others in my office simply refused to use VBA (??), and created sloppy, intractable spreadsheets as a result. So, basically, Propel was an attempt to bridge that gap. It gave the engineers a small number of VBA functions, when combined with vanilla Excel, could accomplish a large number of tasks. Beyond that, users are expected to learn VBA.

 

[IDS]

chadspen - Fair enough, my first comment was really just a knee-jerk reaction to the thread title.

With much the same purpose of making it easier to make documented calculations on a spreadsheet you might be interested in:

Evaluation of functions entered as text:

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/evala-update-and-examples/

Unit aware evaluation of text functions:

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.co...r-excel-2-unit-aware-evaluation-of-functions/

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[loki3000]

i doubt you need a lot of ODE with your daily work...
thanks for the effort anyway.

 

[IDS]

i doubt you need a lot of ODE with your daily work...

Surely that depends on what your daily work is.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[electricpete]

solvewith looks like it could be handy.

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