The previous post in this series included Excel User Defined Functions using closed form solutions to find the ultimate bending and axial load capacity of reinforced or prestressed concrete sections of any complex shape defined by rectangular or horizontal layers. The paper ultimate-moment-capacity1 provides the derivation of the solutions used in these functions. An extract from the paper is shown below.
Newton Excel Bach, not (just) an Excel Blog 
Hello Doug,
sorry if you find this inappropriate; where would you suggest someone like me (structural engineer with no programming background) should start learning VBA in order to write some custom Excel functions?
Thanks a lot,
Radu
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Hi Radu
Well you could start here 🙂
The basics are covered here:
https://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/hello-world-in-a-udf/
and following posts cover a lot of the refinements. If you search this blog for UDF and/or VBA you should find a lot of useful information.
Books I can recommend are Excel Power Programming by John Walkenbach and Excel for Engineers and Scientists by Joseph Bilo.
Both are very readable, and don’t assume a huge amount of programming experience.
If I had to pick one web site for reference it would be Chip Pearson’s site:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/mainpage.aspx.
In summary I’d say the best way to start was:
Pick up the basics of how to get data from the spreadsheet into VBA and back again.
Learn the basics of Basic; data types, control statements, and arrays etc.
Start experimenting with some UDFs and recorded macros.
For general questions you’ll get a better response at one of the discussion groups, but for any questions on anything posted here, feel free to ask here.
Hope that helps
Doug
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hey doug, i tried to understand your paper but failed to do so. Do you have some notes which explains the principles/theory of how you manage to analyse an arbritary reinforced concrete section?
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I have to agree it’s not that easy to follow looking back on it.
I’ll have another go at it when I have time.
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