If you have result(s) from Excel [data table ... ]
that's because you are instructing Excel to do some maths, is it ?
Do the same maths in Smath and get rid of Excel.
Attach your basic project, the maths of it ??? .

Jean-Giraud:

For some reason I though it best to break the work up into 2 different parts taking advantage of each programs's strengths.

In Excel I enter the data as text and want to manipulate it there. Excel is a little bit easier workflow wise to move and traverse the cells to edit the text. Cells in blue are user entered. The ones in black are the result of some manipulation. There is much repetition in these calculations.
Then I import it into SMath for the heavy lifting. For some reason I am under the impression that text operations in SMath are also inefficient and take a long time to do comparatively. Doing the lookups for AISC member properties is another one- in SMath, it spawns another instance of Excel to look up. If I do it in Excel in step one, its a static bit of text (I think). I may be wrong, but I did not think I wanted to repeatedly call a variable/value that was going to be calculated often.

Here are the two ways I came up for workarounds- to use the ASCII reference to quotes then SMath knows it is text, not a variable or definition.



So I read that first spreadsheet in and define a matrix "Equip", the call the elements from that to do a bunch of 'work'. I consistently reuse the index value of the item to track it through the calculation process. The results then get passed off to other worksheets or spreadsheets.



If you have any suggestions or comments to make this more efficient or by better programming, I would appreciate the guidance.

Dennis

Edited by user 07 September 2018 04:33:03(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but if the matrix editor in SMath was as easier to use to manipulate the element values, I would not use Excel for any of this.

I find it is much more efficient to use the arrow keys to move the cursor around to edit values and be able to copy/paste groups of cells and rows/columns. Excel is the better tool for the job right now. For this application, its nothing more than a text editor. I have not tried it, but I wonder how gsheets might work in conjunction with SMath.

I have tried to make an Excel template to write out the syntax for a complete matrix, but honestly, the excel i/o is simpler to use.

I do dump the output of my result matrices to Excel sheets. It makes writing reports and the like easier by using clipboard data. Trying to copy/paste a matrix from SMAth yeilds the mat(...) code instead of cells in rows/columns.

Thanks for posting the examples. I learned a bunch of stuff from the Colebrook Pipe data page. It has given me a number of ideas that I want to try to use tomorrow.

Dennis