Salt Lake City, Utah – May 17 2009
Engineering Paradise is pleased to announce its latest project, an add-in for Microsoft Excel. The add-in allows users to automate the process of converting different types of units and measurements in Excel, including the ability to perform calculations using different unit types. It uses a smart system to read measurements and convert data into the desired unit.
The product is officially called a Excel Unit Conversion Addin, and can be found at Engineering Paradise’s website http://www.unitconversionaddin.com The site allows users to learn more about the product, as well as gives instructions on how to download and install it.
The conversion addin also allows users to conduct dimensional analysis, which is the process of understanding the properties of physical quantities independent of the units used to measure them. For example, every physical quantity is some combination of mass, length, time, electric charge, and temperature and has those properties even without the units to measure them. Dimensional analysis is used in physics, chemistry, engineering, and many other sciences.
The addin is installed into Microsoft Excel 2007 and provides near-instant translations between units and can conduct calculations between different unit types. For example, typing in 10 gallons in one field, and then 1 hour in the next, will allow the user to run multiple calculations including gallon-per-minute and liter-per-second calculations, all just by typing the desired unit measurement.
To illustrate this, Engineering Paradise has included a video that shows the conversion addin in progress on their website.
The add-in is a VSTO object created with MS Office development tools and is written in C#. The reason for doing this rather than writing VBA macros is because object-oriented code made it a lot easier to organize the unit-conversion functionality. However, future updates will probably make use of some VBA macros to increase efficiency.
The addin also conforms to Engineering Standards of accuracy, and can manage conversions or display information for SI units, American Units, as well as the periodic table of elements.
Engineering Paradise was started by a group of engineering students at Brigham Young University who were frustrated by Excel’s limitations in terms of providing convenient unit conversion capabilities. This product was designed to enable scientists, engineers and researchers to focus more on the meaning of the data and research, rather than on micro-managing spreadsheets.
