Release 5.00a: 29 November 2001

The key change in ProSteel 5 is, of course, the use of BS5950-1: 2000 in all the calculation routines within the program. There are a large number of other changes too:

1. Adobe Acrobat PDF file output option: When printing you can now choose whether to send the output to your printer or have it written to a PDF file. This will be particularly useful if you need to email a copy of your calculations to someone.

2. Hollow section support: Steel beam and column design options now let you choose hot rolled hollow sections as well as check them

3. Web update option: For the period of your update cover you will (assuming that you have Internet access) be able to download the latest release instead of waiting for your update disk to arrive

4. Standard note library: Store all those standard notes you put at the end of your calculation sheets and recall them with a couple of mouse clicks.

5. The beam load description field has been increased to 20 characters (on printouts, column widths are now adjusted to suit the maximum length of data entered in each column)

6. Standard load descriptions (such as 'o.w.', 'wall', floor'): Just pick them from a drop down list - your decide the content

7. If you enter a load and forget to enter the start and/or end positions, default values of 0 and L (part UDL's and VL's) and L/2 are entered - a warning message is displayed to tell you that this has been done. Previously the blank field was taken as 0 which meant that the load was ignored.

8. The height of the beam load edit dialog can now be changed: increasing it shows more loads or make the notes pane larger, depending on the page selected.

9. For non-hollow steel beams a check is now made on the unstiffened web capacity at supports. If the reaction is greater than this, the required stiff bearing length is calculated. If this cannot be provided, web stiffeners will be required (this is highly unlikely in domestic scale building structures)

10. Steel bearing plate thicknesses are now calculated using the plate projection beyond the stiff bearing length across the section (taken as t + 1.6r + 2T). This will give a slightly greater plate thickness. (changed following query raised by checking authority)

11. Bug fixed that caused a crash if you tried to calculate a beam bearing plate with a negative reaction at R1 (due to load on cantilever extension of beam)

12. The steel check section dialog now remembers last sort order

13. For stanchions you can now enter separate effective lengths for the major and minor axes.

14. Where a stanchion includes moments calculated from applied reactions, a section schematic is now printed to make it clear which reaction is which.

15. Where a menu item has a toolbar equivalent the toolbar icon is shown on the menu

16. The Project Manager can now be accessed from the keyboard:

17. The 'Combine load and section calculations' option has been removed from the Project Details dialog. Beam loads and steel beam calculations are now always shown in one window,

18. The 'keep windows on screen at all times' options have been removed from the Project Details dialog. When you close a window it is now always closed, not minimised. The old arrangement was a hangover from DOS days and has been redundant since the new style Project Manager was added

19. We are now using UPX compression instead of Shrinker which makes the main program file much smaller - now only 600K!

Release 4.12a: 12 March 2001

As implied above this is a short-term release pending the publication of a new BS5950. The version number change reflects some significant internal changes to the program which do not affect end users, but may fix some odd stability problems and improve execution speed slightly. Other changes and bug fixes in this release are as follows:

1. The 'Latest Information' text is now issued in HTML format (this file), and it is accessible through a separate entry on the Start Menu, Programs, SDA Applications menu.

2. Right clicking on calculation windows now puts up a popup menu containing the most likely options.

3. The calculator now includes inverse trig functions and lets you select the number of decimal points in the output.

4. The Paths and Files page of the User Setup dialog now includes a button which automatically creates a program shortcut icon on your Windows desktop

5. The [optional] explanatory notes preceding beam web opening calculations are now printed in word-wrapped paragraphs between the page margins

6. The Catalogue option was skipping files containing OLE pages - fixed.

7. Beam and stanchion notes containing line breaks were erroneously reformatted when the project was reloaded - fixed.

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