MICROSOFT EXCEL FOR ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS

1.

EXCEL AND THE ENGINEER

As an Engineer, Excel is one of the many tools you have at your disposal in order to perform your function.

Your goal should be to gain a broad awareness of the capabilities and features of Excel, so when youre faced with an engineering problem you can answer the following questions:

Can I use Excel to help solve this problem?

Will Excel help me solve this problem faster than other tools or methods?

Can I make this task easier in the future if I take the time to produce a solution in Excel?

As you expand your familiarity of Excels feature set you will find: You can use Excel to solve a wider range of problems, You will not get stuck half-way into creating a spreadsheet calculation not knowing how to finish the job.

Focusing on the minutiae of using a specific Excel function or feature has limited benefit. These details can be readily referenced from a wide range of sources. Its more helpful to be aware that a particular feature exists, and have a general understanding of how it can be applied to various problems.

2. HELP YOURSELF

Sources for help and study:

a. Self-study courses for Microsoft Office applications can be found here on AMECNet: http://www.amecnet.com/fn/IT/8455.aspx These are an excellent resource for expanding your Excel skill set. Lessons are grouped by experience level and specific Excel feature. Lessons are quite brief, usually requiring no more than 15 minutes to complete, making them ideal for browsing over your lunchbreak. Finally, practice material is provided for each lesson, so you can immediately apply what youve learned. b. Microsoft, online Excel Help and How-to is located here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/CL010072903.aspx?CTT=97 This includes a complete function reference, as well as a huge selection of articles covering all aspects of Excel functionality. c. Finally, Google should be your first stop when researching any technical topic. Often, with a quick Google search you will be able to find a complete solution to your specific problem.

3. GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR TIME AND EFFORT

Generating a spreadsheet calculation is a time investment. In order to produce an easy-touse, clear spreadsheet requires both planning and execution. As with any investment the hope is to generate returns in the future in the form of time-savings for either the author of the original document, or another person that needs to perform a similar calculation.

The following is a list of some simple ways in which you can make your spreadsheet more user-friendly, and by extension making it more likely to be re-used or extended.

a. Avoid obscuring data and calculations

Weve all been there. You want to print your beautiful spreadsheet, only to find that it doesnt fit on one page. You try to scale it down to fit, but then its too hard to read. What to do?

A common solution is to reduce the print area by hiding non-essential rows and columns. While this often solves the problem-at-hand, it can often lead to problems down the road.

Hiding sections of the spreadsheet can make it a challenge to use when it is opened by another user. Put simply it complicates the process of parsing the flow of information in your spreadsheet. In addition, it is one of the most common sources of formula errors.

WORKAROUND: You can use hidden cells and sheets with Excels Custom Views to generate print layouts that can be quickly switched on or off as the need arises.

b. Avoid long, difficult-to-parse formulas

The reasoning behind this suggestion should be self-explanatory. Complex formulas increase the effort required to comprehend the calculation, make it more difficult to make corrections and modifications.

WORKAROUND: Break down long formulas into smaller sub-formulas. You can split a complex formula over several columns, with each column containing a part of the final calculation. Then, use Custom Views to hide the additional columns when printing the spreadsheet.

c. Avoid using formatting to convey information

Colored cell-backgrounds and text, borders font styles and sizes can be a great help in making your spreadsheet easier to read. Be careful that these visual cues are sourced in actual, computable values that Excel can work with.

Imagine a large table of data, that you spent a good deal of time on to color code the rows to convey priority. Red rows at the top of your table are urgent; orange, in the middle, medium-priority; green rows placed at the bottom are low-priority. Certainly your work has not gone to waste. The person you send the spreadsheet to can tell at a glance how many items require his immediate attention.

But heres the problem: this same person decides to sort your table by some other parameter, cost lets say. Now your organized table has become a mess of color; red, orange and green all over the place, with no apparent way to restore order and harmony. Worse yet, some of the low-priority items have just been upgraded to medium-priority. Youre away on vacation, and some poor stand-in has to update your no-longer-clearly organized spread-sheet.

WORKAROUND: Ensure that every piece of information you are trying to convey in your spreadsheet is tied to some real value, stored in one or more cells. In the above example, you can use numbers 1 to 3 to convey item priority. Then, you can use Excels conditional formatting feature to format your spreadsheet as desired, based on these cell values.

d. Avoid referencing entire columns

Referencing entire columns in calculations is a common way in which Excel users try to account for data that may potentially expand in the future. When you want to use one of Excels lookup, for instance, its common to reference the entire table. Your reference may look something like like A:H. This way, as data is added to the table its included in your calculation automatically, and the implementation looks clean, and easy to understand.

The drawback of this practice is mainly in performance. By referencing an entire column you force Excel to look through thousands of rows that it doesnt need to be concerned with.

WORKAROUND: A good alternative to this problem is to use Excels dynamic named ranges. Alternatively its preferable to simply put in a large margin to account for new data. If you expect that you might use several hundred rows your previous reference A:H can be replaced with A1:H2000.

e. Use cell comments to convey intent

Once in a while, we all might have a flash of genius. That long, convoluted calculation or procedure can be made so much simple if we just do this trick or that. The problem with this kind of brilliant solution is that its not always intuitive. The next person that looks at your work may have a hard time to reproduce your train of thought.

Your challenge is to explain your procedure and reasoning to other users of your spreadsheet, without cluttering your work with long passages of text that will have to be hidden prior to printing the document.

WORKAROUND: Excels cell comments are ideally suited for conveying quick notes and explanations to your spreadsheets users. Cell comments are Excels equivalent of post-it notes. Each comment is attached to a specific cell, and only displays when someone hovers the cursor over that cell. When hidden the presence of cell comments is indicated by a small red triangle in the cells corner.

f.

Use descriptive names for sheets, ranges

Sheet1, Sheet2, A20, H9 these generic Excel references convey no information to the user regarding the nature of your calculation or data. Parsing your work-flow becomes a decoding exercise.

WORKAROUND: A simple way in which you can make your spreadsheets selfdocumenting is to use named ranges and descriptive names for worksheets.

g. Where possible, replace constants in formulas with cell references

This problem is related to issue b. If you have a constant that you use in multiple calculations Excel will need to re-calculate this value during each re-calculation cycle. Furthermore, your formulas become bloated, making them difficult to read.

WORKAROUND: Calculate values of constants before entering them into your formulas. You can designate an area of your spreadsheet for defining and calculating constant values, that you will later use in your formulas. Try combining this with named ranges to make the references in your formulas easy to understand.