Determining the socket lengths of bored piles in limestone bedrock

Frustrated at punching the keypad of the scientific calculator and faced with the daunting prospect of doing endless repetitive manual calculations I decided to use MS Excel to make the task of determining the socket lengths vs maximum allowable loads of various types of bored piles in limestone bedrock easier.

However, as this type of work is quite specialised in character there are not enough standard built-in functions in MS Excel to handle some aspects of the design computations.

What should I do other than reverting to manual calculations? Well, I decided that if I the mountain can't come to me I will have to go climb it by all means.

So after spending almost a day tweaking the spreadsheet programming with lots of trial and error efforts I succeeded in writing a few engineering functions to perform some of the specialised computing tasks that I needed.

I was pleased that the huge effort also paid off in other ways too. Using similar logical problem analysis and solving procedures I also succeeded in creating some specialised engineering functions to help compute the geotechnical compression capacity of various types of bored piles socketed in limestone bedrock.

Looking back I succeeded because I wrote the engineering function procedures using the same logical thinking process exactly the way I would have done it by manual calculations. Thus although the finished product doesn't have the "polished" look with the bells and whistles of commercial programs, it gets the work done for its intended purpose; faster and more efficient than if I were to do it by traditional manual calculations using pencil, eraser, paper, calculator and raw brain power.