One advantage of implementing FeResPost as a COM component is that it can be used from other applications. For example, FeResPost can be used from Excel, provided one is willing to write some functions and subroutines in VBA. Several examples illustrate the benefits of using FeResPost from Excel:
A very small example illustrating the use of BLOB and SQL with VBA is given in section VII.1.2.1.
Chapter VII.3 shows how a small tool devoted to the automation of Classical Laminate Analysis can be developed in Excel.
The extraction of results into Excel from a Nastran XDB file is illustrated in Chapter VII.4.
Chapter X.D.2 shows how an entire post-processing project can be developed in Excel. This project allows the data to be defined in Excel, while the actual calculations are handled by VBA modules that call FeResPost objects and methods.
(The second and third Excel examples above are complex enough to warrant their own chapters.)