Microsoft Excel is the most widely used spreadsheet program in the world and is probably the single most universally used software tool by engineers. There are several ways that Excel might be used with kBridge:
▪Input
•Spreadsheets that are either created automatically by other programs or are templates that are filled out by hand by sales staff or application engineers can serve as input for a kBridge application. This can provide a very easy to use and universally available offline method for capture of input Parameters.
•Tools are available for kBridge to read the Parameters directly from individual cells in a spreadsheet, ranges of cells, or named ranges. These values are assigned to kBridge Rules and can drive kBridge Models.
▪Output
•Excel can be used as an output format for several typical types of kBridge outputs such as a bill of material, a record of the calculations done for a Design (an engineering report), or a quote.
•Tools are available that enable kBridge to use a formatted Excel template and write calculated values into individual cells, ranges of cells, or named ranges.
▪Calculations*
•A more advanced use of Excel is for engineering calculations. Of course spreadsheet-type calculations could simply be re-implemented inside of kBridge. However, in some cases this isn’t desired or practical, as when a spreadsheet is used independently of kBridge and must be maintained anyway. In that case, it might not make sense to duplicate the same logic in kBridge, though this creates a second place to maintain it.
•In this scenario, kBridge opens a calculation template spreadsheet, writes some inputs to the input cells, then reads the calculated outputs.
* NOTE: The current implementation of Excel integration works with The Open XML document API and doesn’t require that Excel be running. This has the advantage of not requiring a local copy of Excel and it can be performed on the ‘cloud’. However, if the spreadsheet needs to execute, the full version of Excel is needed.
