Technical Computing Magazine - Issue 41

Prime Time

Sharifa Smith,
Mathcad Sales Specialist

Mathcad Prime 2.0 combines an extremely user-friendly, taskbased interface with virtually all the features and functionality that have made Mathcad the world’s No.1 engineering calculation software. It’s certainly won us over to the “new style” Mathcad!

When Mathcad Prime was first released some two years ago, users were excited (and so were we!) at the completely redesigned, modern, ribbon-based interface which makes it so much easier to learn and use. Mathcad Prime’s much improved matrix handling, intuitive WYSIWYG equation editor, full dynamic units support and support for multi-threading and 64-bit architecture opened up a bright new future for Mathcad.

However some experienced Mathcad users were initially held back from moving to Prime because that first version didn’t implement all the functionality of the more traditional Mathcad.

Mathcad Prime 2.0 has changed all that.

For a start, collapsible areas are back. Long a popular feature of Mathcad, this allows you to hide and password protect any areas of your worksheet you choose. That means you can share your document among colleagues and managers who don't want or need to be distracted by your more complex workings. Equally as important, you can share the document with customers, regulators and co-workers while protecting your sensitive information and intellectual property.

Symbolics also make a welcome return in Prime 2.0. Being able to manipulate symbolic and numeric calculations in real time means you can get your formulae just right before plugging in the numbers, and avoid rounding errors too. Both symbolic and numeric calculations remain live as inputs or formulae change.

Powerful 3-D plotting capabilities and an Excel component that allows full interactive use of spreadsheet data within Mathcad are also welcome additions to Prime 2.0. This latest version also introduces new, advanced solvers for optimisation and many new operators and functions; while its more powerful performance makes it easier to handle such data intensive tasks as statistical analysis, signal processing and image processing.

Prime 2.0 users particularly like the ability to place labels on expressions. This lets you assign names to identify each type without the worry of overwriting another type when you use it, for example when defining a unit; or you can give a different label to a variable or a function.

It’s impossible to cover all the good things in Mathcad Prime 2.0 in this short magazine article. For the full picture, click the links below right.

Mathcad Express
Coming soon – a new type of Mathcad Trial Version! Mathcad Express will, like the current trial, give you a fully functioning copy of the latest Mathcad, free of charge for 30 days. But when that expires, it will still be usable with a limited function set until you’re ready to purchase a full copy of Mathcad!

What’s next for Mathcad?
In previous editions of TCM we’ve brought you advance news of upcoming features in Mathcad Prime 1.0 and 2.0. Now we can give you a taste of what to expect in Mathcad Prime 3.0, due for release in the second half of 2013 (and then available as a free upgrade to all Prime 2.0 users with current Mathcad Maintenance).

A new feature that many will eagerly anticipate is the planned ability to create live maths regions in-line with text, including superscripts and subscripts as well as Greek characters.

The developers are also working on some major enhancements to Mathcad's plotting capabilities, enabling plots to handle much larger data sets; and plot titles, axis labels and other elements will be easier to add, position and manipulate.

Another major development will let you control anchor points of regions, to make your presentations more readable. This means, for example, that you'll be able to place equations influencing a plot immediately next to it rather than several lines above.

Several users have specifically asked for the return of the global definition operator found in earlier versions of Mathcad, which let you set definitions to apply throughout the worksheet. This is due to be re-introduced in Prime 3.0.

Other expected enhancements to help you produce better presentations and documents include design templates, maths region formatting and highlighting, intelligent pasting of Mathcad content into other applications, and a spell-checker.

Undoubtedly the best way to get a feel for all the new features in Prime 2.0 is to download a 30-day trial - available free of charge. You can take the time to test the tools and functionality in the context of your own work and really put the software through its paces or download Mathcad brochure , or visit the Mathcad home page.

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