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First Three Essential Inputs in a Typical Module Calcs.com aims to be both powerful and easy to use. Allowing you to perform highly-efficient calculations in as many design scenarios as possible, however, can mean that some calculators have a lot of knobs and dials. The good news is that we’ve also done our best to let you design a safe structure while touching as few of those inputs as possible!

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Inputs in Our Calculators

In all of our beam and column calculators, the only truly mandatory inputs are:
  1. Member Selection: Which section size or shape you wish to use in design. Note that we have some powerful features, including our Member Selector and Autosize, which can make this a breeze, especially if you select your selection last after inputting everything else.
  2. Member Length: Total material length of your beam, or height of your column
  3. Support Locations: For a beam, where are the walls, columns, or girders holding the beam up? For a column, is it multiple stories tall (a support should be added at each)? See our descriptions of what all the support types are, in either metric units or Imperial units.
  4. Loads: We’ll put on some default loads that are typical for the type of beam or column you select, but you might have higher loads for your structure’s usage (such as in bathrooms or hallways), or you might have another member that’s supported by this one (for which you can create a load link). Just scroll a short ways down the page and you’ll see all the types of loads you can add - including point loads or distributed loads in metric units or Imperial units.
Beyond those few essential inputs, everything else you can change should only make a typical design more efficient. That’s because we set reasonably conservative default values for everything else. So if you enter just those inputs described above and then do nothing else, your design might be a bit over-conservative, but unless you have a particularly unusual structure, it should be safe. The screenshot here shows a typical module with those key inputs marked (in this case, the US wood beam module).

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Inputs for your Project

The inputs you see when you first create a project are covered in Required and Optional Project Inputs.