Excel and MathCAD are the major tools of the trade for structural design, but creating transparent design calculations and standard workflows to use across projects remains a challenge. While Excel is well suited for batch calculations, it is difficult to create a step-by-step design narrative. MathCAD is great for illustrative single element calculations (with unit consideration) but lacks a mechanism for batch calculation and table generation needed for design summaries.
Jupyter Notebooks utilizing the Python programming language can offer a free and open source alternative to this design calculation paradigm, allowing for illustrative and idempotent documentation. These workflows are widely used in the data science and scientific communities to create reproducible reports on an approachable platform that does not require extensive programming knowledge. This workshop will show attendees alternate approaches t