Spreadsheets

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ICON_Under-Construction

This topic describes SAM 3.0 and has not been revised for SAM 2009 Beta.

You may find useful information, especially if you are new to SAM, but some of the information may be inconsistent with the new version.

Solar Advisor displays inputs and results in two different Excel workbooks:

•The case summary contains six spreadsheets containing inputs and results for a single case.
•The project summary contains a set of six spreadsheets for each case in the file.

Note. If the project or case includes parametric variables, the results in the workbook are for the base values of the parametric analysis. The results spreadsheets do not display the results of parametric analyses.

To open the case summary:

•Click Spreadsheet in the navigation menu. If the Run Analysis button appears instead of the results buttons, click Run Analysis to generate results. You can also open the spreadsheets on the Results menu by pointing to Case Summary, and clicking Spreadsheet.

SS_button-resultssummary

To open the project summary:

•In the Results menu, Click Project Summary.

SS_menu-resultsprojectsummary

For each case or project summary that you open, Solar Advisor creates an Excel workbook with the name of the current file and stores it in a temporary folder, which is C:\SAM\temporary by default. When you close Solar Advisor, it deletes any workbooks in the temporary folder. If you want to save the workbook, use Save As in Excel to save it to a folder other than the temporary folder.

In the project summary, the spreadsheets for each case are labeled by a number indicating the position of the case tab in the Solar Advisor main window: Case1, Case2, etc.

The six tabs for each case are Cashflow, Metrics Table, Inputs, Hourly Data, Monthly Data, and Annual Data:

•In the cash flow spreadsheet, the values in the After Tax Net Equity Cash flow row are equivalent to the values shown in the Cashflow standard graph on the Results Summary page. See Cash Flow for a description of the cash flow variables and calculations.
•The data on the Metrics Table tab are also shown on the Metrics table on the Results Summary page.
•The Inputs tab displays a list of input variable names, values, and units.
•The Hourly Data tab contains sets of 8,760 values that Solar Advisor uses to simulate the system's performance.
•The Monthly Data and Annual Data tabs contain monthly and annual averages of the hourly data.