Excel 5.0


This spreadsheet may be useful to someone who has access to a stadia type instrument and wishes to map their property. Doing these types of calculations by hand is extremely protracted and mistakes made early spoil latter ones. In short, it's the ideal type of problem to attack with a spreadsheet. I had to write a few dms to decimal angle routines for this work because Excel 5.0c did not include them. If anyone needs to use these routines in another application, they can do so simply by pasting in the module worksheet.

Survey calcs Spreadsheet 171k .xls file.
This spreadsheet started out simply as a list of the courses I have taken and a reminder to myself of my impressions of each. Through the years I have expanded it to calculate my GPA and then further to analyze my GPA performance based on my ratings of each class in a four categories. It contains a graphical interface which allows attenuation of courses that fall outside of upper and lower limits in each of these categories.

Grades Spreadsheet 180k .xls file.
Naturally, I chose one of my favorite spreadsheets to put here for the time being. It is my first (and probably last) attempt at employing what I call a "massively 3-D" architecture. That is, using cross-worksheet references in a systematic way.

The problem attacked here was the solution of a system of non-linear equations by what is known as the Hardy Cross method. It was for a Hydraulics lab that I took last Winter. Trying to explain how it works is so challenging (to me) that I will neglect to do so unless someone shows interest.

One other interesting thing is that I have imported a vector image that I had drawn in AutoCAD as an illustration of the pipe network. This technique is remarkably easy to do and it results in a very fine image when printed. It can also be scaled nicely unlike a raster image.

Hardy Cross method for a solving a system of non-linear equations. 140k .xls file.

It is worth noting also that using a spreadsheet it a terrible way to do this problem. There is no need for thousands of intermediate solutions and re-calcs (which I have set to take place only when hitting the F-9 key) take much time even with enough RAM. For this reason, I will never go back and make other changes to reflect things I have learned since writing the thing.

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Much more than a decade after I wrote the above, someone asked about this. It would not open with later versions of Excel. I did manage to open it with OpenOffice, then saved it in .ods format. Something is wrong with the references, but the formulas and drawings seem to be in tact so it could possibly be useful albeit with some effort. I made no attempt to fix it for .ods, and after all of these years I have forgotten a lot of the material.
Hardy Cross method for a solving a system of non-linear equations. 40k .ods file.
Best of luck with it. -tomh - 2/1/2011
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