Category Archives: Computing – general

Excel Uservoice and Python for Excel

Posted on 18/12/2017 by dougaj4

The Excel Uservoice site is a forum for users to post suggestions for improvements to Excel.  A suggestion to add native Python support to Excel, as a replacement to VBA, has had by far the most votes since the start, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general, Excel, Link to Python, VBA | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Working with milliseconds in Excel

Posted on 27/05/2017 by dougaj4

Edit 3rd Jan 2026: This download is not currently available. A recent post at Eng-Tips looked for a solution to problems with working with times in Excel, when time differences are required to the nearest millisecond. The problem is that although … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general, Excel, UDFs, VBA | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Indexing pdf content, again

Posted on 04/03/2017 by dougaj4

I discovered today that my latest computer (with 64 bit Windows 10) had not been indexing the content of pdf files, which makes doing a search on local file content pretty much a waste of time.  Checking the file search settings … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Running exe files from Excel

Posted on 30/06/2016 by dougaj4

Following on from the previous post (running a compiled Fortran finite element analysis program from Excel), this post looks at the details of calling any command line routine from Excel, through VBA.  The important points that need to be addressed are: Writing … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general, Excel, Finite Element Analysis, Fortran, Geotechnical Engineering, Newton, VBA | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Making non-linear FEA with Excel go (much) faster

Posted on 30/06/2016 by dougaj4

The spreadsheet presented in the previous post takes about 90 seconds to complete (with the iteration limit set at 500) on my computer, and is much slower on some other systems.  The VBA code that does all the hard work is based … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general, Excel, Finite Element Analysis, Fortran, Geotechnical Engineering, VBA | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments