Programming Skills

Crane Capacity Look Up

Excel Capacity Look Up

Looking up crane capacities for each lift involved using info on the Excel cover sheet to find the capacity in a 3" binder. The tedious, error prone process meant I looked up and manually entered capacities 20-80 times per lift plan.

I automated this process using python with a sqlite db and excel for the frontend. The capacities for each crane are entered into a sqlite db. The script uses the xlwings module to pull the info from the Excel coversheet, then uses the sqlite module to query the database and fills in the capacity cell on the coversheet with the info from the db.

The result, on average, saved hours per plan between quicker lookups and eliminating errors which reduced the number of plans that needed to be redone.

The code is available to view on Github, it's the xlCapLookUp.py file in this repository.

Capacity Look Up with GUI

A byproduct of the Excel capacity look up project is the accompanying Qt GUI I created. It reuses the db infrastructure from the excel project and makes the db accessible to all users on all platforms.

Tally Block Fill

Filling tally blocks involved manually copying info from the Excel coversheet to the tally block sheet for each lift then copying that sheet into the vertical views of each lift.

I attacked this issue by learning VBA, writing a macro to automatically copy the latest tally block workbook to the job folder, select the correct worksheet(it varied based on crane configuration), renaming the workbook and filling in the appropriate worksheet.

The script decreased errors on the drawings which lead to an average of an hour per plan by reducing the number of plans that needed to be redone.

The code is available to view on Github.