Streamline performance of Excel in stepwise implementation of numerical solutions

Excel spreadsheet not only provides useful facilities to solve various kinds of engineering problems, but also can be simply utilized to enhance the curriculum of engineering courses. In this paper, first a summary of literature review on the application of spreadsheets was presented. Reviewing the literature of the application of Excel in different engineering fields shows that Excel was only applied for different individual applicants; while it can be utilized to implement the solution of all kinds of physical problems because of various facilities which Excel provides. In this regard, the step‐by‐step numerical solutions of several examples from all kinds of physical problems in civil engineering were implemented into Excel. The educational merit of this study is the stepwise implementation of Excel and Visual Basic Application (VBA) solution to simple examples of all kinds of physical problems without any advanced requirement of prior knowledge of the software. The robust performance of Excel in solving all the considered examples demonstrates that the Excel appraisal in solving engineering problems should be more addressed than what it is in the current literature. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 24:555–566, 2016; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.21731

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