The Mote Method

Are you Conventional?

March 8, 2010

The engineering analysis is always a hot topic, in any drawing office, on any project. Applying national standards, to the letter, and increasing levels of sophistication into the analysis to prove the design is adequate, is often revisited and debated throughout the project life. However, the process of preparing the engineering calculations is an unspoken subject almost anywhere in the world. Proving your design, on paper, to the same degree as the analysis, is  often in the way. The engineer is only concerned with proving to themselves, rather than the reader, that the design is adequate.

Engineers doing conventional calculations, often have to number the pages themselves, add titles, collect and arrange an assortment of different software outputs.  These reports are often long on quantity, time consuming to handle and short on quality.

The description of ‘hand’ or conventional calculation is a mixture of the software output used, and cobbled together into a file.  It has a variety of titles, headings, and footings from a range of software applications used by the engineer with the different default settings. It may include hand-written and/or scanned notes.  MS Excel may be used, in a limited sense, to create the headings and footings template for the calculations and simple tabulations. An electronic version of this convnetional masterpiece would not become available until such time the final collated hardcopy output is scanned. MS Word may or not be used in this spaghetti arrangement. Incredibly, most engineers express little or no knowledge of MS Word.

Typically, the engineer would start the preparation of the calculation when it was felt the design was ready, vague as this sounds, and most of us know the design is only almost ready when the alarm bells start ringing as the deadline approaches.  Generally, the reports are not only ‘heavy’ in terms of the quantity and also of the ‘pre-processing’ information (inputs) but light in terms of quality and the ‘post-processing’ (outputs).  Typically 70 to 80% of the calculation is devoted to the pre-processing information and only the corresponding 20 to 30% for the results due to the deadline pressure and the effort to complete the detailed design and print this finalized state.

The alternative is this. The electronic-style calculation is a single document (in Microsoft Word format), capturing all the relevant information using graphic-capturing procedures such as:

Please go to http://www.motagg.com/resources/ to download an example file: “BRDPF in Word.pdf” or http://tiny.cc/VsN5O. This calculation is 39 pages. There are so many rules and ideas in there I will explain over the forthcoming blogs. When I did this calculation conventionally with MathCAD, I ended up with hundreds of pages and I did not want to repeat that, so I challenged myself.

Microsoft Word is proposed here as the central tool, although other software and desktop facilities would easily suffice.  MS Word creates the template for the calculations with a fixed heading and footing for all pages.  The calculation is a static report, graphically capturing all the components required for an effective and planned report, the report is not dynamically updated by changes in MS Excel. This is one of the more common dead ends. I recommend you do not try to work with links.  If the Word file, with these links, is stored in a different location, then all links have to be repaired.

As part of the effective workflow method, this report is started early as the design progresses.  The pre-processing phase is tackled earlier, and is minimized, leaving more time for the post-processing stage of the work.  The calculation pages are numbered automatically and the word document is available immediately at any stage of development for anyone on the project.

Pressing the print screen key captures the window view to the clipboard; paste this image into a MS Word document, and crop to suit.  This is very simple and works well without a graphic capture software application like Snagit.

When working between MS Excel and MS Word, the default ‘paste’ button in the main toolbar has probably upset more engineers than any other difficulty in trying to make MS Word the central goal of the calculations.  The first secret is out now, you want to use edit >  paste special > picture.  This should be the actual default paste button on your standard toolbar rather than the standard clipboard button many try to use which often result in profanity and time-wasting struggles.

If you also download the Excel version (http://tiny.cc/Uycwg) you can try the following. Highlight a range of cells, including drawn images and right click to copy. Go to any word document and go to Edit > Paste Special > Picture (enhanced metafile). You may see a different option to this enhanced metafile, so long as it says “picture” it should work. If you haven’t changed any defaults in Word then you will probably see a black frame around the picture. Right-click on picture to get a drop down menu and select layout. Change the layout to behind text. This will enable you to move your image around.

This method means you have a scalable and movable image.  It is so simple and stress-free, it is hard to believe this is the number one golden rule for engineers. It never fails.

The implied strategy is to maximize the use of MS Excel as your calculation pad. The Word template is developed for the report heading, titles and page numbering is available so that time is not wasted in formatting MS Excel worksheets with fixed headings and footings (see The Engineer’s Word).

Use MS Excel as an electronic extension of the calculation pad (see The Engineer’s Tables), complete with macros (see The Engineer’s Basic, forthcoming), for checking imported data, spreadsheets and graphics. All or some select few of these components are transferred to the Word document.  The Excel work is the dynamic component for checking the adequacy of the design, reporting the numbers and results in good formats.  Excel is a powerful application for which the design can be controlled and the impact on presentation maximized.  This is the core recommendation of this book.  Generally, all software outputs, (the source files), is captured, and is a snapshot into the Word document, most often through MS Excel.  You will learn how fast and effective reports are generated by this method.

Filed under: calculations