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Several years ago, when Mathcad had only a few thousand users rather than the million plus which it has today, someone described it as "being to mathematical calculations what the calculator is to arithmetic". That holds true as much as ever. While doing mental arithmetic gives us all a degree of satisfaction, the need to do things quickly and accurately mean we almost inevitably reach for a calculator for anything past the basic 'times tables'.
The same is true for equation solving, calculus, matrix algebra and the like. It's great to reach the answer with a pen and paper (or even a spreadsheet!) but if you want to get an answer you know you can rely on, in a fraction of the time, there's really no real everyday alternative to Mathcad.
We bring this topic up because with the launch of the new Mathcad 8 Professional, the basic reason why it has become one of the most popular technical software programs in history can easily be obscured. There are now so many features to do with graphics, publishing and generally making life easier that we can all overlook why so many engineers, scientists, researchers and mathematicians depend on it as a day-to-day tool. Mathcad is all about being able to get equations into a PC document and have them solved automatically. It's so good at its job that there's never really been any competition.
Many people make a very good job of using spreadsheets to do engineering calculations. The spreadsheet is a tool which many engineers find on their PC as standard, and it's tempting to try to make use of it in applications it was never really designed for, simply because it's there. Sound familiar? If so, you may well be one of the many people who are now so proficient with a spreadsheet that you've forgotten where spreadsheets fall down in the first place: they were designed to make straightforward arithmetical calculations tidier and more automatic entering technical calculations isn't easy, and the whole idea of the spreadsheet is to hide this away as much as possible anyway. Seeing what's going on, in terms of the formulas being used, is actually made deliberately difficult by a spreadsheet!
Which, of course, is why many other people still use the back of an envelope to do engineering calculations. And we all know why: when it comes to writing out an equation, would you choose a spreadsheet over pen and paper? Of course not.
There must be a better way, and Mathcad is it. As its very basic premise, it allows you to enter equations as easily as you'd write them on paper, and it goes on to do calculations with them like a spreadsheet. In fact, far more intelligently and in far greater complexity than any spreadsheet would possibly claim to be able to handle. And unlike a spreadsheet, your work is laid out on the page, making it easy to publish, distribute and check.
But if you're not familiar with Mathcad, don't let us lead you into thinking it's some sort of natural language spreadsheet. Far from it. Think of Mathcad as a multipurpose technical DTP system with a calculation engine underneath, where whatever you type in or call up onto the page becomes a 'live', intelligent item. So if you write out a symbolic equation on one line, then, on the next, assign a value to one of the variables, the equation will update to reflect that assignation. If you request the equation to be shown as a graphical plot, that appears too, and will be updated as and when anything changes.
And this is just the start. Mathcad has entire textbooks of engineering and scientific formulas available as inbuilt resources, so you can call up standard equations and add them to your work once pasted into a document, again, they become live and pick up any defined relationships with existing variables.
The equation solving power of Mathcad is legendary. There's a full symbolic maths 'engine' inside the system, and a complete range of numeric differential equation solvers. All these are accessible with almost no effort, and indeed, Mathcad has some intelligent features which anticipate much of what you want to do - including understanding and converting SI and other units.
At a number of engineering and research organisations, Mathcad is a central part of the standard toolkit on every user's PC. It integrates beautifully with standard workgroup and Office applications (including spreadsheets of course), and is often to be found as the core of group work, as it allows technical work to be communicated easily. In addition, with education and training establishments such as The Open University having standardised on Mathcad on their courses, more and more staff are arriving at companies already familiar with what Mathcad can do. As you'd expect, there's a massive and enthusiastic user base communicating regularly through the internet, so Mathcad has also become an invaluable tool in investigative research and development. Most PC users nowadays are familiar with most of the ways the PC can be of benefit to them in their work; there are few applications which can, overnight, transform the way they work. But Mathcad is one of them and very little else can do that!
Jacqui Cheswick & Joanne Rigg |
