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Latest version of industry-standard technical software features open standard for document formatting and XML for information management and application interoperability

Adept Scientific has announced the release of Mathcad® 12, the latest version of the industry-standard calculation software from Mathsoft Engineering & Education, Inc. Mathcad is a powerful and flexible environment for developing and documenting calculation-based technical projects, and this new version includes many improvements to help organisations create, manage and make best use of their critical engineering and scientific information.

Mathcad 12 includes an open data model, scalability, new flexibility to document critical values, greatly expanded units and dimensions handling, and new 2D plotting capabilities. Mathcad 12′s new XML architecture delivers an open engineering data model enabling powerful publishing, collaboration, integration and search capabilities, especially when deployed as an enterprise standard.

The improvements in Mathcad 12 stem directly from feedback from the extensive Mathcad end-user base, comprising over 1.7 million engineers, scientists and other technical professionals in more than 50 countries. This customer base encompasses the vast majority of leading engineering-based industrial corporations, hundreds of government agencies, and thousands of colleges and universities around the world.

“Mathcad 12 is a powerful calculation management system for R&D and engineering organisations,” said Mathsoft CEO and President Chris Randles, “and represents nearly two years of intense development. Mathcad embodies our bedrock belief that engineering is a core competitive advantage for most organisations, and that management is hungry for ways to complete work faster. With Mathcad 12, we squarely address these considerations and seek to vault users into the future of business computing.”

New capabilities in detail
New Mathcad 12 adopts XML as its native file format, based on schemes to represent manageable engineering information. Users can automatically save Mathcad files as XML documents, making them easier to search and share with other users and systems, including document management applications, computer-aided design (CAD) programs and product data management (PDM) solutions. According to Gartner analyst Marc Halpern, “Adopting XML as a standard data representation will mean 40 percent reduction in calculation traceability costs by 2007.” Beyond cost savings lie a host of untapped revenue opportunities for Mathcad customers using XML to share business and engineering processes with colleagues, customers, partners and suppliers.

With XML, Mathcad 12 simplifies the conversion of Mathcad files into XHTML and XSL-FO formats, enabling easier publishing as Web, PDF and other formatted documents. This flexibility provides myriad new ways for engineering organisations to maximize the value of their intellectual property, such as the ability to produce indexed, searchable PDF files. XML also enables results to be saved in worksheets and then viewed and used without having to reopen Mathcad – a key distinction for auditing purposes and regulatory compliance.

Users who upgrade to Mathcad 12 will also benefit from a new ability to define default units. For example, engineers can select inches instead of feet as a default length unit. This flexibility lets engineers work intuitively without being forced to execute extra conversions to accommodate the software. Users will also find 18 new built-in units to add to the hundreds of engineering and scientific units Mathcad already tracks.

Mathcad 12 includes new 2D plotting options, including a new secondary y axis which allows data on two different scales to be plotted on the same set of axes. It also provides the ability to change colour on markers, and an improved interface to change colour on grids. In addition, Mathcad 12 includes the ability to position legends; change font face, size and colour for plot titles and labels; and more flexibility in zoom and trace operations.

Mathcad 12 is, for the first time, implemented with a Microsoft .NET architecture for stability and scalability. Mathsoft has reinforced this new architecture with the results of a two-year development process, reviewing and revising code to achieve stability and better memory management. In the words of one user, Bob Wilson of Wilson Engineering Services, “This is good for the future of our company, since I think it has many benefits in the form of safe, reliable and easily extensible code. We’ll also benefit from the improvements to 2D plotting capabilities and the ability to add metadata.”

Mathcad 12 also includes new documentation organised around the tasks users most often perform, significantly adding to their productivity; a new Data Import Wizard for bringing multiple data types from other applications and sources into Mathcad; new Web controls that make it simple to insert sliders, dropdown boxes and other features into worksheets; and the ability for any Mathcad user to create worksheets for the Mathcad Application Server.

Mathcad 12 and other Mathsoft products are supplied and supported in the UK and Ireland by Adept Scientific plc

With offices in the UK, USA, Germany and throughout the Nordic region, Adept Scientific is one of the world’s leading suppliers of software and hardware products for research, scientific, engineering and technical applications on desktop computers.