A Brickwork Course Is One Horizontal Layer—Here’s How to Tabulate It

A brickwork course is one continuous horizontal layer of masonry units bonded with mortar. The horizontal mortar beneath the units is the bed joint. Those definitions come from the Brick Industry Association’s current brick masonry terminology guide.

For drawing checks, surveys or historical-building records, course numbers are more useful when paired with calculated elevations. A simple spreadsheet can turn “opening starts at course 12” into a dimension readers can filter and verify.

Start with the dimensions actually specified

Do not build a universal course chart from the word “standard.” Brick sizes and joint conventions vary by product and region.

For a common UK example, the Brick Development Association uses a 215 × 102.5 × 65 mm clay brick with a nominal 10 mm mortar joint. That produces a 225 × 112.5 × 75 mm coordinating size, so the nominal vertical module is 75 mm. The same guide stresses that manufacturer-declared work sizes, tolerances and ranges still matter (BDA, Designing to Brickwork Dimensions).

A common US modular brick is different. The Brick Industry Association lists a specified height of 2¼ inches and a ⅜-inch bed joint, with three courses coordinating to 8 inches. It also warns that brick names and sizes can vary by manufacturer, so specifications should use dimensions rather than a name alone (BIA Technical Note 10).

Record these inputs before calculating anything:

Field	Sample value	Meaning
brick_product	UK sample clay brick	Identifies the product or assumption
brick_height_mm	65	Manufactured or specified unit height
bed_joint_mm	10	Nominal horizontal mortar-joint thickness
course_module_mm	75	Brick height plus bed joint
datum_mm	0	Reference elevation for the table
dimension_source	BDA guide, 2023	Provenance for the inputs

Label this as a sample dataset, not a specification for a live project.

Calculate each course elevation

Put the inputs in fixed cells—for example, brick height in B2, bed-joint thickness in B3 and datum in B4. In the course table, place the course number in A8 and use:

=$B$4 + A8 * ($B$2 + $B$3)

If the datum is the supporting surface beneath the first bed joint, the result is the nominal top-of-course grid elevation:

course_no	nominal_top_mm	nominal_top_m
1	75	0.075
2	150	0.150
3	225	0.225
4	300	0.300
8	600	0.600
12	900	0.900
16	1200	1.200

This is a coordinating grid, not a promise that every built course will land at the exact value. Brick tolerances, joint variation and site conditions separate nominal set-out data from measured work.

Make the datum convention explicit. If a survey instead measures from the bottom face of the first brick and excludes a bed joint below it, use:

=datum + course_no * brick_height + (course_no - 1) * bed_joint

Mixing these two conventions creates an immediate one-joint offset.

Structure the publishable table

Keep assumptions in an inputs sheet and observations in a courses sheet. A useful public table has one row per course and wall face, with columns such as:

• wall_face_id
• course_no
• nominal_top_mm
• measured_top_mm
• variance_mm
• feature_type
• feature_id
• measurement_date
• source_reference
• notes

Calculate variance_mm as measured minus nominal, but preserve a blank when no measurement is available. In an Excel table, for example:

=IF([@measured_top_mm]="","",[@measured_top_mm]-[@nominal_top_mm])

Do not use zero for a missing measurement: zero is a valid variance and asserts that the measured and nominal elevations match.

Use controlled values for feature_type, such as sill, lintel, damp_proof_course, movement_joint and none. Keep descriptive comments in notes rather than packing several facts into one cell.

Validate before sharing

Check four things:

1. Each wall-face and course-number pair is unique. If the table is intended to contain every course, also check for gaps in the sequence.
2. The formula uses absolute references for inputs. Otherwise, copied formulas may drift to empty cells.
3. Units appear in headers. Prefer nominal_top_mm to a bare height column.
4. The source and datum are documented. Readers need both to interpret every elevation.

Add a plain-language caption, for example: “Nominal and measured top elevations for each brick course on the north elevation; datum is the supporting slab at 0 mm.” For more structure, see how to write accessible table captions and summaries.

Once checked, save the clean table as CSV or XLSX. TablePage accepts CSV, TSV, XLSX and XLS uploads and creates a public dataset page with a filterable table and shareable link, according to its current publishing page. Publish only non-sensitive project data, then test filters such as wall_face_id and feature_type before distributing the link.

The result is more useful than a static “courses-to-height” image: readers can isolate openings, compare nominal and measured elevations, and trace every assumption back to its source.