Frame Analysis in MS Excel Format

Why don't you write your own Excel program? It should not be difficult if you understand the principles involved. That is one of the advantages of using MS Excel...you can do your own thing.

And make it available to others

in fact you can use formula in the cell with sign "=", its easy to do.

for example, in A1 cell, you fill in " = A3 x A4", after you copy it whole column, when you fill in number, for example, 3 in a3 and 12 in a4, in a1 you can get 36, similaly, when yu fill in b3 with 6 and b4 with 16, yoiu can get in b1 with 96.

there are so many formula for your select in the function table.

Don't trust black box solutions. I work in structural engineering and it's when someone takes a generalized calculation and doesn't check that something bad happens. Not "garbage in-->garbage out" because WHO in their right might would make a mistake like that?!? It's a case of putting your fine china into the trash compactor instead of the dishwasher and then wondering why the final result isn't what you expected...all because someone else couldn't write a proper set of instructions or be bothered to fix the bugs.

Take a look at winbeam though if you're still interested in speeding things up a bit. Not an excel sheet but not a bad tool.

Thanks for the nice comment. Anyway, I just want to speed-up a little bit but I'm taking care of checking things that the computer gives before accepting its results. It is there just to help life easier a little bit.

This site used to offer daily free downloads of many "simple" Excel engineering programs (structural, mechanical, electrical, etc.). I found their site very useful.

Here's the link: www.excelcalcs.com

I read an article that claimed 80% or so of all "programs" written in Excel produced erroneous results. The reason is the formulas are hidden and it is hard to debug. Do yourself a favor and prepare it in MathCAD or similar software.

Nothing can replace verifying the calcs yourself.

Believe it or not in a robotics course in school we found a bug in the java libraries from Sun Microsystems for the definition of an inverse sine. We couldn't the code itself but after some lengthly debugging of a robot that would work fine and then freak out and dislocate it's shoulder we found that the inverse sine function we were calling out returned an angle that was off by 180 degrees. Needless to say, the prof was pretty shocked that the bug existed and that we managed to track it down. Hi fives all round!

"Do it in a database" or "do it in MathCad/Matlab" seems to have become the default conventional wisdom response to any spreadsheet question, regardless of whether these programs are really more appropriate for the problem concerned.

If people are producing bad programs in Excel then changing to MathCad isn't going to change that, and if mistakes coming out of Excel spreadsheets are getting through the verification system then that's not a fault in Excel, that's a fault in the verification system.

As for the original question, I have a series of spreadsheets on my blog working up from analysis of single beams to complex 2D frames which might be of interest. You should be able to follow them through from the first one by clicking on the links in the comments:

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/frame-analysis-with-excel-1-single-beam/

In Excel you can do something like this.

If you are familiar with the formulas and the procedure, you will get accurate results.

Moment Distribution is simple enough to create an Excel spreadsheet.