Anyone who uses TRACE inevitably finds themselves in a bit of a predicament sometimes. Only so many changes can be made in TRACE 700 using templates, and sometimes a user needs to make many changes that templates can't do. Learning to use TRACE 700 with Excel will help you save some time.
The best way to start is to go to the view menu and select the component tree view. In this case, lets say we are working on a baseline building, alternative 2, which is behind alternative 1, and we want to change the windows to be a maximum of 40% as specified in ASHRAE 90.1-2004 Appendix G. We would select under rooms, openings, and here we can see percent area. Some of the windows are 30% and some are 50%. We could copy the whole line. Then we go into Excel and we right click and paste. Now with these values, we could go through them one by one, but let’s say we had a hundred rooms here, and we did not want to do that. What we could is select equals the minimum of 40, which is our limit and our number. We drag this across, and now we're either going to have 30 where applicable, and 40 whenever it was greater than 40. So we can copy this, go back into TRACE 700, and paste our values.
Of course, this is just one example of how excel can help you. Anytime you need to apply any sort of pattern, Excel can probably get the job done. Another problem that surfaces pretty often is a difference in miscellaneous loads between alternatives one and two. So if we go back to alternative one, here we’ll select window, and tile horizontally. And we’ll go into alternative one, select rooms, and miscellaneous loads. Here we're going to copy the room, the miscellaneous load type, and the its value. We can go into Excel paste the data, go back into TRACE 700, select miscellaneous loads under alternative two. It's important to know that sometimes the rooms are not in the same order. It could happen whenever maybe you've deleted a room. Or if you just edited a number of rooms, the order of the rooms sometimes changes. Since the rooms are not in the exact same order, the simplest thing is to reorder them which we can do by selecting all of the data, selecting in the upper right sort, and we're going to go custom sort, we're going to sort by left to right. And we're going to sort by row 14, alphabetically. And we're going to do the same for alternative one.
Now we have everything in the same order, and we can simply say subtract alternative one’s value, minus alternative two’s value. We can then drag and drop this all the way across the board, and we notice that they're identical. However that doesn't tell us if there’s a difference in the schedule or the units. The question is how do we compare if the units or text field is different? Well let’s say for instance, one of these fields, red, miscellaneous, elementary, gym. We would not notice this by looking at it, however I’d like to introduce the concept of conditional formatting. We can use conditional formatting to easily identify any differences in this whole set of data. We do that by selecting the value in the upper left, just for simplicity; we could select any of these. If we select a value in the upper left, and select conditional formatting, please note that this is available in almost all versions of Excel.
Before we can go to conditional formatting, we need to select the first set of data. If we select all of the data, we can go to conditional formatting. If we select new rule, we can format only cells that contain cell value equal to, and we want to start with the next available data. So in this case we’ll say equal A14. It's important to not enter any dollar signs, as that locks all values equal to this one cell. So we select that, and we select okay. Now, that’s all that it takes. Instantly, we have highlighted all the values that are the same, and we aren’t highlighting the value that is different.