Looking for good panelboard program

[stevev123]

I am an electrical consulting engineer and have used a linking XLS spreadsheet as my panelboard program for many years.
Problem: several of the data entry employees do not know Excel well enough and often screw up the formulas. Cell protection is difficult with this spreadsheet's logic.

I am looking for a commercially available program, not too complicated, that allows linking of panel loads, demand factors, can be easily copied from job to job, CAD output, upgrades available as OS changes occur, help TXT, etc.

Any thoughts?

 

[hbendillo]

I have my own thread going about this problem but looking at it from a little different perspective. I too use a spreadsheet for my panelboard schedules. I have done a lot of work on my program in the last year and am quite happy with it. I have used spreadsheets developed by other engineers in past years and threw out the bad and maintained the good aspects of some those and developed some of my own wrinkles. In my thread we are discussing the pro's and con's of automating panelboard creation and engineering calculations. As for your spreadsheet, sounds like you need to set it up so that most of the information for your schedules is extracted from where the user inputs that data rather than have formulas within the panelboard area. In addition, you can use cell locking and data validation to keep people from messing up formulas. This all takes a lot of work of course. There are commercially available programs that can do the work and I can suggest some that I have found, however I have never used them because of the cost.