Excel: Your best friend and worst enemy

Update nightmare

Spreadsheets need updating, for example, a change of code. You are then forced to try and reverse engineer all that work in Excel. It seems you might need to start all over again or try to adjust all the formulas and pray that something doesn’t get broken.

Maybe... but how about instead choosing software that is designed for the tasks you need to perform regularly, is always up to date, and helps you avoid placing risk at the heart of your construction projects? Just like dentists do not use a chainsaw to perform intricate dental surgery, pushing technology to perform something that is beyond its scope can often be asking for trouble.

But give it its due, Excel is still pretty powerful, and if we talk about connection design, spreadsheets can check standard connections and do it very well. So, you can have one spreadsheet for thin-plate connections and another for end-plate connections, etc., and these spreadsheets are super if that’s all you are checking. But then you want to make some minor changes to your design and your thin plate is no longer centered on a column and there is an eccentricity. Then, you need to move it an additional 10 mm. Can your spreadsheet still handle this? Probably not.

We have all the data, somewhere…

Data transference is an inevitable part of structural engineering. With Excel, there can be a lot of data distributed across multiple spreadsheets. However, avoiding the need for manual data entry by copying and pasting from one spreadsheet to another will also help prevent the risk of human error creeping in.

Plus, what if the data you are copying is wrong or corrupted or by pasting the wrong data to the wrong field causes something to break somewhere? This can, and will, have a significant impact on the calculations you are performing, and the errors, in most cases, can be like looking for a needle in several haystacks.

"We have always used Excel"

“Ten years ago, we created an Excel spreadsheet that could calculate every connection and member we needed. It even included code compliance. We have used it for everything since.”

Being conservative in the technology you use means using formulas and approaches that are no longer fit for purpose. Have you ever tried designing connections and calculating forces only to have to update your entire design because something has changed or bolts need to replace welds? How well does Excel handle that? And how quickly? How about trying to calculate openings in walls? And what about changes to building codes? How effectively can you find where to do that in the formula if the original creator retired three years ago and is not replying to your calls?

You might pride yourself on being pretty Excel savvy, but spreadsheets take a lot of maintenance, and frankly, not everyone has either the skills, the time, or enough coffee.

What happens if one of your formulas has broken and you finally notice it after 13 months? That’s 13 months of projects with potentially critical errors to try and unpick. How are you going to explain that to the investors? And worse still, what happens if nobody spots it? Can you afford such a risk?

The ultimate multiple source of truth

If you can get everyone working on the same spreadsheet rather than creating dozens of variants with increasingly inventive suffixes like “latest_version”, “latest_latest_final_version”, or “absolutely_the_last_version_I_promise”, you will still likely have an admin nightmare. Even having the one document approach by keeping everything in the Cloud doesn’t always help. People love downloading and editing spreadsheets from their desktop, making identifying the “single source of truth” almost impossible. Should someone change something somewhere, the knock-on effect can be massive when cell K323 is part of a function for calculating cell Q3672 on sheet 3.

Excel loves number crunching

You are under pressure, time is running out so fast that your clock is experiencing asthma. “No worries, we have Excel!” You calculate the load for your connection but the data you enter is very wrong because you are in a rush! Does Excel shake you by the shoulders and warn you? No, it doesn’t have a clue. As far as Excel is concerned, it is just crunching some harmless numbers and it knows how to display them as a multi-dimensional pie chart, if you’d like.

So instead, you have decided to take the leap and ditch those spreadsheets. You have found an alternative, it looks and acts in a familiar way. Maybe too familiar? Be careful, there are many alternatives to Excel that are either a rewrite of Excel or worse, based on Excel spreadsheets themselves. So, while you might prefer Google Sheets, it is still designed to offer a similar experience as Excel does, which is not really going to solve the problem that Excel created. And if they are all bells and whistles but run on Excel spreadsheets, you might as well keep Excel and buy a slide rule.

Proper jobs need proper tools

The choice is yours

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