1. Home
  2. Tekla Tedds
  3. How to store your own calculations

How to store your own calculations

Tekla Tedds
Not version-specific
Tekla Tedds Tekla Tedds for Word

Calc Libraries

As you write more calculations you'll soon realise that you write some of your calculations repeatedly for different projects. One of the most powerful features of Tedds is the ability to store your calculations in a reusable Calc Library. A Calc Library allows you to store fragments of a Word document so that you can reuse them to compose new documents. This allows you to write calculations that can be reused again and again to save you time.
To save content to a Calc Library you use the Library Access System (LAS). By default the LAS uses a simplified read only mode so the first thing you will need to do is to activate the advanced mode which allows you to create and edit your own libraries.
  1. Open Tedds for Word
  2. Open the Library Access System
  3. From the main menu in the LAS select View and then select Advanced Menus

Creating a Calc Set

To start saving your calculations you will first need to create a Calc Set. A Calc Set is an index to the actual Calc Items stored in your Calc Library, the Calc Set does not actually store any of your calculations it is just an organised collection of references to the calculations stored in a Calc Library.
  1. From the LAS open the File menu and then select New which will open the New Calc Set Wizard
  2. Click Next to skip the welcome page
  3. Enter a descriptive name for your Calc Set so that you know what it contains, for this example enter My steel calcs and then click Next
  4. Accept the default properties for the Calc Set, Version, Author and Status by clicking Next again.
  5. Finally click Finish and the wizard will create your new empty Calc Set.
A Calc Set can contain two types of components Items and Groups. Items are the references to the actual Calc Item stored in a Calc Library and Groups allow you to logically organise those items.

Creating a Group

  1. From the LAS open the Edit menu and select New Group.
  2. Enter a name for the new group, for this example Tie force design

Creating a Calc Item

Before you start saving calculations you need something to save, for this example enter the following simple calculations into a Tedds for Word document.
Tie Force Design
Minimum yield strength; Fy = 275 N/mm2
Tie force; Tf = 450 kN
Tie effective length; Le = 5 m
Slenderness limit; λl = 300

Results
Design strength; Fa = 0.6 * Fy = ? N/mm2
Minimum gross section area; AMIN = Tf / Fa = ? cm2
Minimum radius of gyration; rMIN = Le / λl = ? cm
  1. From the LAS open the Edit menu and select New Item.
  2. You will now be prompted to select the calculations you want to save from your Tedds for Word document. Select the heading Tie Force Design and the four lines of input variables that follow it then click OK.
  3. You now need to enter a unique name for the item you are about to save, in this example enter Tie force input and then click OK.
In your Calc Set you should now have a new item Tie force input located inside the group Tie force design. If you click the Preview button on the LAS toolbar you will see the calculations that you have saved. Now repeat the above steps and save the results section of the calculation as a new item named Tie force results.
Image
news_topic4_1_si.png

Using Stored Calculations

Now that you have saved some calculations to your library you can retrieve them to create new documents. Open a new document in Tedds for Word and then from the LAS execute the two items you created previously, as you execute each one you'll see that Tedds adds the contents of that item into your document at the current insertion point. You can now calculate your document to produce the finished calculations.

Summary

Storing your calculations in a calc library allows you to create calculation components that can be re-used again and again. Each component can contain as little or as much as you need, from a single expression to multiple pages of calculations. By carefully considering how you break up your calculations into separate Calc Items you can maximize how reusable those components are. You are not limited to storing just calculations you can store anything from a Word document including, text, tables, drawings, photographs etc.
For more information about writing Tedds calculations please refer to the Tedds documentation which is available from the Tedds help menu. Step by step tutorials on writing calculations can be found in the Tedds Quick Start Guide also available from the Tedds help menu.
Was this helpful?