Hi there!

You use Excel almost every day as an engineer.

It’s a huge program with a lot of great potential, but how do you know if you’re using it to
its fullest capabilities?

This guide will help you start to get the most out of Excel for engineering and I really
hope you enjoy it.

It’s meant to be quick and easy to digest – a review for some and new information for
others.

And if anything doesn’t make sense yet, don’t worry!

I’ll be back soon with more great information to answer your questions and make
everything crystal clear.

Charlie Young, P.E.

EngineerExcel.com

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 1 CONVERT UNITS
WITHOUT EXTERNAL TOOLS

If you’re like me, you probably work with different units daily. It’s one of the great annoyances
of the engineering life. But, it’s become much less annoying thanks to a function in Excel
that can do the grunt work for you: CONVERT. Its syntax is:

CONVERT(number, from_unit, to_unit)

Where number is the value that you want to convert, from_unit is the unit of number, and
to_unit is the resulting unit you want to obtain.

Now, you’ll no longer have to go to outside tools to find conversion factors, or hard code
the factors into your spreadsheets to cause confusion later. Just let the CONVERT function
do the work for you.

You’ll find a complete list of base units that Excel recognizes as “from_unit” and “to_
unit” here (Note: not all units are available in earlier versions of Excel), but you can also
use the function multiple times to convert more complex units that are common in
engineering.

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 2 USE NAMED RANGES TO TAKE
THE CONFUSION OUT OF FORMULAS

Engineering is challenging enough, without trying to figure out what an equation like
(G15+$C$4)/F9-H2 means. To eliminate the pain associated with Excel cell references,
use Named Ranges to create variables that you can use in your formulas. Not only do
they make it easier to enter formulas into a spreadsheet, but they make it much easier
to understand the formulas when you or someone else opens the spreadsheet weeks,
months, or years later

There are a few different ways to create Named Ranges, but these two are my favorites:

1. For “one-off” variables, select the cell that you want to assign a variable name to,
then type the name of the variable in the name box in the upper left corner of the
window (below the ribbon) as shown above.

2. If you want to assign variables to many names at once, and have already included
the variable name in a column or row next to the cell containing the value, do this:

a. First, select the cells containing the names and the cells you want to assign
the names.

b. Then navigate to Formulas>Defined Names>Create from Selection.

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 3 UPDATE YOUR CHARTS AUTOMATICALLY
WITH DYNAMIC TITLES, AXES, AND LABELS

To make it easy to update chart titles, axis titles, and labels you can link them directly
to cells. If you need to make a lot of charts, this can be a real time-saver and could also
potentially help you avoid an error when you forget to update a chart title.

To update a chart title, axis, or label, first create the text that you want to include in a single
cell on the worksheet. You can use the CONCATENATE function to assemble text strings
and numeric cell values into complex titles.

Next, select the component on the chart. Then go to the formula bar and type “=” and
select the cell containing the text you want to use.

Now, the chart component will automatically update when the cell value changes.

You can get creative here and pull all kinds of information into the chart, without having
to worry about painstaking chart updates later. It’s all done automatically!

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 4 HIT THE TARGET WITH GOAL SEEK

Usually, we set up spreadsheets to calculate a result from a series of input values.

But what if you’ve done this in a spreadsheet and want to know what input value will
achieve a desired result?

You could rearrange the equations and make the old result the new input and the old
input the new result.

You could also just guess at the input until you achieve the target result.

Fortunately, neither of those are necessary, because Excel has a tool called Goal Seek to
do the work for you.

First, open the Goal Seek tool:

Data>Forecast>What-If Analysis>Goal
Seek.

In the Input for “Set Cell:”, select the

result cell for which you know the target.
In “To Value:”, enter the target value.

Finally, in “By changing cell:” select the

single input you would like to modify to
change the result. Select OK, and Excel iterates to find the correct input to achieve the
target.

Goal Seek is also great for finding roots of equations or solving an implicit equation
(one that can’t be solved to get a variable alone on one side of the equal sign).

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 5 REFERENCE TABULAR
DATA IN CALCULATIONS

One of the things that makes Excel a great engineering tool is that it is capable
of handling both equations and tables of data. And you can combine these two
functionalities to create powerful engineering models by looking up data from tables and
pulling it into calculations.

You’re probably already familiar with the lookup functions VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP. In
many instances, they can do everything you need.

However, if you need more flexibility and greater control over your lookups, use INDEX
and MATCH instead.

These two functions allow you to lookup data in any column or row of a table (not just
the first one), and you can control whether the value returned is the next largest or
smallest.

You can also use INDEX and MATCH to perform linear interpolation on a set of data.

This is done by taking advantage of the flexibility of this lookup method to find the x- and
y-values immediately before and after the target x-value.

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 6 ACCURATELY FIT
EQUATIONS TO TABULATED DATA

Another way to use existing data in a calculation is to fit an equation to that data and use
the equation to determine the y-value for a given value of x.

Many people know how to extract an equation from data by plotting it on a scatter chart
and adding a trendline. That’s OK for getting a quick and dirty equation, or understanding
what kind of function best fits the data.

However, if you want to use that equation in your spreadsheet, you’ll need to enter it
manually. This can result in errors from typos or forgetting to update the equation when
the data is changed.

A better way to get the equation is to use the LINEST function. It’s an array function
that returns the coefficients (m and b) that define the best fit line through a data set. Its
syntax is:

LINEST(known_y’s, [known_x’s], [const], [stats])

Where:

known_y’s is the array of y-values in your data,

known_x’s is the array of x-values,

const is a logical value that tells Excel whether to force the y-intercept to be equal to
zero, and

stats specifies whether to return regression statistics, such as R-squared, etc.

LINEST can be expanded beyond linear data sets to perform nonlinear regression on
data that fits polynomial, exponential, logarithmic and power functions. It can
even be used for multiple linear regression as well.

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 7 SAVE TIME WITH USER-
DEFINED FUNCTIONS

Excel has many built-in functions at your disposal by default.

But, if you are like me, there are many calculations you end up doing repeatedly that don’t
have a specific function in Excel.

These are perfect situations to create a User Defined Function (UDF) in Excel using Visual
Basic for Applications, or VBA, the built-in programming language for Office products.

Don’t be intimidated when you read “programming”, though.

I’m NOT a programmer by trade, but I use VBA all the time to expand Excel’s capabilities
and save myself time. For example, I’ve written UDF’s to return material properties,
perform linear and bilinear interpolation, and even solve differential equations in
Excel.

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 8 PERFORM CALCULUS
OPERATIONS ON TABULATED DATA

When you think of Excel, you may not think “calculus”. But if you have tables of data you
can use numerical analysis methods to calculate the derivative or integral of that data.
These same basic methods are used by more complex engineering software to perform
these operations, and they are easy to duplicate in Excel.

To calculate derivatives, you can use either the forward, backward, or central differences.
Each of these methods uses data from the table to calculate dy/dx, the only differences are
which data points are used for the calculation.

●● For forward differences, use the data at point n and n+1

●● For backward differences, use the data at points n and n-1
●● For central differences, use n-1 and n+1, as shown below

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If you need to integrate data in a spreadsheet, the trapezoidal rule works well. This method
calculates the area under the curve between xn and xn+1. If yn and yn+1 are different values,
the area forms a trapezoid, hence the name.

9 TROUBLESHOOT BAD SPREADSHEETS

WITH EXCEL’S AUDITING TOOLS

Every engineer has inherited a “broken” spreadsheet. If it’s from a co-worker, you can
always ask them to fix it and send it back. But what if the spreadsheet comes from your
boss, or worse yet, someone who is no longer with the company?

Sometimes, this can be a real nightmare, but Excel offers some tools that can help you
straighten a misbehaving spreadsheet. Each of these tools can be found in the Formulas
tab of the ribbon, in the Formula Auditing section:

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As you can see, there are a few different tools here. I’ll cover two of them.

First, you can use Trace Precedents to locate the inputs to the selected cell. This can help
you track down where all the input values are coming from, if it’s not obvious. Many times,
this can lead you to the source of the error all by itself. Once you are done, click remove
arrows to clean the arrows from your spreadsheet.

You can also use the Evaluate Formula tool to calculate the result of a cell – one step at a
time. This is useful for all formulas, but especially for those that contain logic functions or
many nested functions:

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 10 USE DATA VALIDATION TO
PREVENT SPREADSHEET ERRORS

The final tip ties in perfectly with the last one. (Anyone who gets ahold of your spreadsheet
in the future will appreciate it!) If you’re building an engineering model in Excel and you
notice that there is an opportunity for the spreadsheet to generate an error due to an
improper input, you can limit the inputs to a cell by using Data Validation.

Allowable inputs are:

●● Whole numbers greater or less than a number or between two numbers

●● Decimals greater or less than a number or between two numbers
●● Values in a list
●● Dates
●● Times
●● Text of a Specific Length
●● An Input that Meets a Custom Formula

Data Validation can be found under Data>Data Tools in the ribbon.

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