Programme or App Development Help

Ron Burgundy II

Need some help/advice. I'm going into my final year of college next Sep, and as part of the final year I need to do a project. The course is Structural Engineering.
Instead of creating an excel sheet, where the end user inputs values and can see the workings of the calculations within the excel sheet.

What I would like to do is create a programme that has an interface to allow the end user to input data get advice on how to calculate loadings or wind loadings from Eurocodes etc. But they can't see the computations in the background. The user will be prompted in stages and at the end will get a print out of the design.

Ideally excel is used as the engine to do the calculations while another programme that can link with excel provides the interface for in putting data.

I don't have any programming background so the basic and simplistic the better.

Would MS Access be suitable?

This doesn't need to be in any way fancy basic is fine for me. I hope the above makes sense.

Thanks
Ron

mightyreds

Do you input your own calculations into excel

28064212

Ron Burgundy II wrote: »

Need some help/advice. I'm going into my final year of college next Sep, and as part of the final year I need to do a project. The course is Structural Engineering.

What's the purpose of the course/project? If it's not "to demonstrate programming skill", why are you introducing complications?

Ron Burgundy II wrote: »

Ideally excel is used as the engine

Why?

Ron Burgundy II

Yeah excel will have all the design calculations.

The user puts in basic data such as spans, loadings etc.

From this excel can take these inputs and calculate the formulas that I have put in

Ron Burgundy II

28064212 wrote: »

What's the purpose of the course/project? If it's not "to demonstrate programming skill", why are you introducing complications?Why?

Project will more than likely be an analysis or design of a particular structural member, could be RC Concrete, steel etc. At the end I'll have to produce an excel sheet where basic data is entered at the beginning and the design is worked out, without any more interaction with the user.

mightyreds

Ron Burgundy II wrote: »

Yeah excel will have all the design calculations.

The user puts in basic data such as spans, loadings etc.

From this excel can take these inputs and calculate the formulas that I have put in

Look on YouTube, udemy or code academy for a python programming course, might take you ten hours over the summer but you get the hang of creating a simple app run on the command line.

Ron Burgundy II

mightyreds wrote: »

Look on YouTube, udemy or code academy for a python programming course, might take you ten hours over the summer but you get the hang of creating a simple app run on the command line.

Thanks

28064212

Ron Burgundy II wrote: »

Project will more than likely be an analysis or design of a particular structural member, could be RC Concrete, steel etc. At the end I'll have to produce an excel sheet where basic data is entered at the beginning and the design is worked out, without any more interaction with the user.

You're still not clear about what the project is supposed to accomplish. Why are you trying to move away from Excel if you have to have an Excel sheet at the end?

Speedwell

This can be done completely within Excel. In my last job, we created a distressingly complex project planning worksheet that calculated all resource costs, time costs, complexity factors, and other estimations based on data entered more or less informally by the project manager. Yes, it did require a lot of formulas and linkages. But don't assume it can't be done.

Tom Dunne

Ron Burgundy II wrote: »

Ideally excel is used as the engine to do the calculations while another programme that can link with excel provides the interface for in putting data.

Is there a particular reason you need Excel? Or is it just because you know it can be done in Excel?

Ron Burgundy II wrote: »

Would MS Access be suitable?

I wonder, based on this question, are you thinking of Access for its forms and ability to create a GUI?

Any software development language can do what Excel does in terms of calculations. Sure, it is made a little easier with Excel due to the pre-defined functions, but most modern languages would have libraries for such calculations.

I think, and correct me if I am wrong, you want a form, where a person can enter data, it does a few calculations and displays the results. Would that be a fair assessment of the situation?

If so, the likes of Python or Java could be used to build the user interface and do the calculations in the background.

pillphil

As much as I hate VBA, you could also build the interface in Excel.