Category Archives: VBA

Continuous beam analysis with cubic splines

The last example in the previous post illustrated the use of cubic splines to find the bending moments in a continuous beam subject to prescribed lateral displacements.  A similar technique can be used to find bending moments, shear forces, reactions, … Continue reading

Posted in Arrays, Beam Bending, Excel, Finite Element Analysis, Frame Analysis, Maths, Newton, UDFs, VBA | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Cubic Splines

Cubic splines are used to fit a smooth curve to a series of points with a piecewise series of cubic polynomial curves.  In addition to their use in interpolation, they are of particular interest to engineers because the spline is … Continue reading

Posted in Beam Bending, Excel, Newton, UDFs, VBA | Tagged , , , , | 73 Comments

A catenary function

Following on from the previous post, here is an Excel User Defined Function (UDF) to calculate the coordinates of any specified catenary, with the option of also finding the tension force at any point. Download from: Catenary.zip The download file … Continue reading

Posted in Arch structures, Excel, Maths, Newton, UDFs, VBA | 3 Comments

Adding Function Categories and Descriptions

User defined functions (UDF’s) are by default added to the “User Defined” category in the function list, and when a UDF is selected the words “no help available” appear, rather than a description of the function and it’s parameters.  A rather … Continue reading

Posted in Excel, UDFs, VBA | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Some string functions

It was pointed out in a comment to this post at Daily Dose of Excel that VBA has a StrReverse function that will (logically enough) reverse a string.  That’s not awfully useful to me (except maybe for Project Euler), but it … Continue reading

Posted in Excel, UDFs, VBA | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments