i am new to excelcalcs and very impressed with the spreadsheets....i would like to start developing some ....i do mostly civil, structural and geotechnical calculations....however, i am still trying to figure out the best way to perform some of the advanced functions on excel - such as selecting a beam and having the properties come up in designated cells ...i have bought quite a few books on excel, but none of these seem to get me up to par with the other professionals on this site ...could someone please direct me to a site, book, planet to elp me gain the knowledge? .....thanks

Thank you for your kind comments eng619 your query has been asked a number of times so I thought it was about time I uploaded a video to cover good techniques when working with tabular data in Excel. The video is in two parts. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here.

Here at ExcelCalcs we endeavour to serve a community brought together through a common interest in making calculations in Excel. One of its strengths is that we seem to have attracted a number of very skilled professionals who use Excel in the most innovative ways. Personally I get great pleasure in receiving spreadsheets to learn different approaches and techniques in the application of Excel. Excel is vast and there is a lot to learn and I am still learning. If you need any help in developing spreadsheet for publishing on the site you find all of us will only be too glad to help you out in any way we can.

I use XLC to document my calcs in Excel. I assume I don't need to tell anyone here how glad I am for XLC. Occasionally, however, I have an equation that I just can't format the way I want using XLC, usually thanks to the building code writers. It typically goes something like this:

w = 4 x h_sub(d) if h_sub(d)<= h_sub(c) or 4 x [h_sub(d) / h_sub(c)] otherwise, but <= 8 x h_sub(c)

If I write something like this in MS Equation Editor or in MS Word and then paste it in it gets the job done (painfully, compared to XLC), but eventually they seem to blow up. One day I'll open the spreadsheet to find out that those equations have decided to double in size, and it's a pain to fix them once, let alone more. I like pasting in from MathCad for ease of equation writing, but their formatting is odd and doesn't match XLC.

What does anyone else do? Asking XLC to handle "if" statements is a lot, and often there isn't space to break them down and document every step with XLC...in a calc I really want to keep to one page of output.


thanks,
Gordon Goodell

Hi Gordon, thanks for your question. I too have worried about the best way to display if statements. My advice is to keep your IF() functions as simple as possible so that they are more readily understood. If you look in text books words are often added to explain the logic this is easily done in Excel too. As an example I am just working on a calculation for plastic stress distribution in a rectangular beam.