Planting A Firm Foundation

Standing on One Foot
Last week we officially released QuickRFooting 1.0. This new tool provides a stand-alone implementation of reinforced concrete spread footing design. It is easier to use and much more powerful than our current footing design 'report' in VisualTools. The new tool will also allow IES to expand into more complicated footings in the near future.

Walking with Both Feet
Our immediate goal with this new footing tool is to integrate it with VisualAnalysis and QuickRDesign so that you can easily take the necessary information about your loads into the footing design tool to complete the design. Many customers have asked about this and we are working to get this done sooner rather than later. Whether it will appear in an update next month, or in the next major upgrade is still not clear, but we will keep you posted.

Running with QuickRFooting
Right now QuickRFooting will help you get your job done quickly and efficiently with a tremendous set of features in a very easy to use package. You may currently be doing these calculations by hand or with a home-grown spreadsheet, but our new tool will quickly prove more capable and more reliable than either of those methods. Each and every check, each and every assumption is spelled out in the program with clear algebraic equations and full-color graphics. There will be no doubts about your footing designs or their documentation.

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Practical Management
Hidden Features in VisualAnalysis, Part 5

Window Management
Judging from the project files that we receive for technical support inquiries with 25-80 open windows, many of which are identical, we have come to the conclusion that the Window menu is a hidden feature!

The majority of you use "Maximized" windows while running VisualAnalysis and this means that other windows are hidden behind the 'active' window.

There is really no major problem with having 80 windows open in VisualAnalysis, yet they will consume more memory, slightly hinder performance, increase file sizes, and make it more difficult to find the one window you need.

Here are some keys to better manage the windows in VisualAnalysis:

File Management
VisualAnalysis comes with two nice file features to help protect you against disasters. You should take 5 minutes to understand these features and use them to your advantage. Or you may wish to turn them off because you already have a disaster management plan and our system is redundant and wasting your time and disk space!

Timed Backup: VisualAnalysis will automatically create a 'crash protection' file every X minutes as you work. If the shuts down unexpectedly, you would lose at most X minutes of work. When you exit VisualAnalysis normally, this file is automatically deleted. When you start VisualAnalysis after a crash, this file is found and VisualAnalysis offers you the option to use it or delete it.

History Files: Whenever you open a project file VisualAnalysis can automatically save a copy of the current file in a safe place, marked with a version number. This way, if you make a major change to your project AND SAVE IT, but then later decide that was a major mistake, you can go back to a previous version of the file. By default, these files are tucked away in your TEMP folder. (The location is defined by Windows but normally "C:\Documents and Settings\<your login>\Local Settings\temp\"). You may specify a more convenient path in the Customize Behavior box.

You will find the settings for Timed Backup and History Files, under Tools | Customize Behavior, on the Files tab. You may also read more in the VisualAnalysis help file.

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Ask Dr. Dan

Caution: Theory Zone Ahead!

A Customer Asks:
"I created a custom shape in the Database Editor and now I get really goofy deflections in VisualAnalysis.
What is going on?"

Dr. Dan Replies:
VisualAnalysis and ShapeBuilder both have the ability to use Shear Areas (or Shear Factors) to calculate specific contributions from shear, which are normally neglected because they are small. In certain problems, such as short and deep beams, shear can play a significant role. In general, though shear deflections are neglected.

There was a problem with our tutorial "Custom Shapes using the Database Editor". The tutorial said to use a zero shear area, but then gave the value as 0.01 in². This tutorial has recently been corrected to show a true zero value (0.0 in²).

It turns out that 0.01 (or some other relatively small value compared to the cross section) is a really bad number to use in the matrix formulation and causes deflection values to 'explode'!

Accordingly, we have also updated VisualAnalysis to ignore shear areas by default and to guard against unreasonable values so that 'stray' numbers in the database do not cause future problems for customers.

In order to use shear areas you will need to have the advanced level of VisualAnalysis, and you will need to specifically turn on this feature under Tools | Customize Behavior, on the Analysis tab. The rationale for this change is that most customers do not need or truly understand shear areas, they just make the software more complex.

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