The new features and enhancements in PTC Mathcad Prime 10 will be appreciated by new and longtime Mathcad users. As a longtime Mathcad user, I appreciate the enhancements to the symbolic and numeric engine and the addition of advanced controls. I am also glad to see PTC incorporating many of the useful features previously found in Mathcad 15.
Mathcad Prime 10 improves upon the text styles features added in Mathcad Prime 9 by now allowing subscripts and superscripts. This is good news! I now no longer need to type square meters as m^2 or use a smaller font to type a subscript.
Previous versions of Mathcad Prime allowed you to include a worksheet, meaning that the values of the included worksheet are available to use in the current worksheet. This is a great feature to keep your worksheets more concise. Get to know this feature if you are not familiar with it. Mathcad Prime 10 now allows you to easily open the included worksheet. In the Include region, just hover over the file path, hold down the CTRL key, and then click the file path. The included worksheet will open, allowing you to view the worksheet.
In addition, Mathcad Prime 10 enhances the internal link feature added to Mathcad Prime 9. Instead of only being able to link to specific regions in the current worksheet, you are now able to have Mathcad open another Mathcad worksheet and move to a specific region in that worksheet. To do this, the region in the linked Mathcad file must have a tag assigned to it. Create a link to a region in another worksheet by selecting a word or words in a text box and selecting Link on the Text tab. Type in the path and file name of the linked worksheet. At the end of the file name, type # plus the tag name of the desired region. The # needs to be immediately at the end of *.mcdx without a space.
Mathcad Prime 10 adds the ability to use advanced controls for Mathcad input. The advanced control options are: List box, checkbox, text box, radio button, slider, and button. These controls are very useful, especially if you want to reuse your worksheet multiple times, or if you are trying to create a standard calculation sheet with a consistent set of inputs. The controls can be populated with repeatable input, which correspond to designated output. The output is unitless, so it is important to attach the appropriate units to output values.
The concept of the advanced controls is very powerful, especially if you are proficient in scripting language. If you are like me and have never used VBScript or JScript, then there is a daunting task of learning to script. (If you endeavor to learn scripting, learn JScript. Microsoft is deprecating VBScript.) I hope that future versions of Mathcad Prime will allow for simpler application of the advanced controls such as providing a table where you can add both the input text and the output data. Register for the Advanced Controls Crash Course for an in-depth training on this feature.
Mathcad Prime 10 comes with some robust enhancements to the symbolic engine. If you are not familiar with symbolic calculations, I encourage you to dive in and learn the power of using symbolic solutions rather than numeric solutions, but that is a topic for another blog. If you are familiar with symbolic solutions, then you will appreciate many of the enhancements. Here are some of my favorites.
The Mathcad development team have also produced another, more exhaustive video going over all of the above symbolic engine updates and more. You can watch that here.
Mathcad Prime 10 also comes with improvements in the use of multithreading to speed up worksheet processing.
Each new version of Mathcad Prime has enhanced both usability and functionality features. Mathcad Prime 10 is no exception and has added some great features. I look forward to using it on a regular basis.
Join us for an informative webcast to explore PTC Mathcad Prime 10's Advanced Controls with scripting feature. Learn the benefits and applications of Advanced Controls, even without prior experience writing JScript statements.
