Excel

Overview

Excel Engine is the part of the suite that turns model data into a finished spreadsheet: you design the sheet, and it fills it.

The designer is a cell grid. You type content, merge cells, insert rows and columns, set alignment, place images and a company logo, and undo your way back out of any step. The layout you draw is the layout the filled workbook has, so an office's own sheet format can be reproduced rather than approximated.

Alongside the layout you set the rules. A category is tied to a block of rows, and the parameters you pick become that block's columns. Each block gets its own filters, its own grouping, and its own totals, so one sheet can carry several differently shaped tables. Cells can also be pointed at project information fields or given fixed text.

Filtering offers six conditions: equals, not equals, contains, starts with, greater than, and less than.

A saved template is an ordinary Excel workbook. The layout and all of the rules live inside that one file, with nothing travelling beside it, so a template can be copied between machines or sent to a colleague as a single attachment. The rules sit on a hidden sheet within the workbook: you can open a template in Excel, but deleting that sheet leaves the template unusable. Saved templates are kept in one list and can be removed from it.

The designer does not read your model. The categories and parameters it offers are the ones supplied by the tool that opened it, and the figures that land in the sheet - quantities, for example - are computed by that tool before the workbook is written.

It has no ribbon button of its own. In the shipped add-in the designer opens from inside the bill-of-quantities tool, which uses it to create and edit that tool's templates. It opens in front of that window and holds it until you close the designer.

Everything happens on your machine. Templates are read and written as files on disk, and nothing is sent anywhere.

The interface is English.