Different Methods of Displaying Images in PTC Mathcad Prime

One of the best reasons to use PTC Mathcad is how the software facilitates creating a unified engineering document, capturing your intellectual property and design intent. At the core of this are your engineering calculations, but your document can also be annotated with text, plots, tables, and images. This multimedia combination provides an efficient and effective way to explain concepts and design intent to your end user, whether that's yourself when using Mathcad as a scratchpad for new ideas, another department when you're using Mathcad as an intermediate step to analyze or validate a design, or your final client because Mathcad is your software of choice to generate your ultimate deliverable or report.

This article explores the unique ways to insert images into your Mathcad worksheet, with all of their intricate differences. To summarize this article's lesson in a sentence: don't copy-paste; use the dedicated image button.

There are three officially supported ways to add visual content to your worksheet: copy-pasting from another application, using the dedicated image button, or inserting an OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) object. This article also discusses a fourth unsupported, unofficial workaround to dynamically display and update images with the Excel Component.

Common reasons to add images include adding a company logo (yours and your client's), inserting a CAD drawing or some other technical figure to provide context for the reader, and including your client's requirements within the document.

Copy-Pasting

Pros: Fastest method
Cons: Does not maintain transparency

PTC Mathcad Prime officially supports pasting content into your worksheet that was copied from elsewhere, with familiar control methods (Ctrl + V, right-click → Paste, or the ribbon interface’s Paste command that you can find in both the Math and Document tabs). Pasted images will display in their original dimensions. You can use the drag handles on the image region’s bottom-center and right-center sides to resize it, but only in its original aspect ratio.

Look at this official Mathcad YouTube channel video featuring a worksheet by Mathcad's product management director, Andrew McGough. He is showcasing a new feature in PTC Mathcad Prime 12, changing the worksheet background color:

Notice the PTC Mathcad logo in the top left corner of the worksheet's header. It was copy-pasted into the worksheet. I know for certain that the original Mathcad logo file was transparent, but when the worksheet author copy-pasted the image into Mathcad, the image lost transparency. This is especially noticeable when Andy changed the worksheet background color to gray.

The image command

Pros: Maintains transparency and quality/resolution when images are resized
Cons: Must already have the image in your file system; there isn’t a keyboard shortcut; high-resolution images will inflate worksheet file size

You can access the dedicated Image command from the ribbon (in either the Math or Document tabs), or with the right mouse button menu on an empty space. Starting with PTC Mathcad Prime 11, the Image command will immediately search your file browser upon use, inserting the image in the worksheet where your cursor is. (In previous versions of Mathcad, the Image command would insert a special button in your worksheet that you could drag around, and then you'd have to click the button to search your file browser.) The image will display at the original size on your system (if it is very large, it may even span multiple Mathcad pages and enter your Draft View), but you can resize it with the drag handles.

Not every file type is supported. The Image command supports raster formats such as .png, .jpg, .gif, .ico, .bmp, .tiff, and .wdp. .gifs will not animate and will instead load in as their first frame. You will notice that vector file formats such as .svg (used mostly for company logos) are not supported; PTC recommends using high-enough resolution .png files instead. Note that .pngs can be transparent, while .jpgs cannot. Transparency is particularly important if you will set the Worksheet Background Color to something besides white. (By default, Worksheet Background Color is set to the off-white Paper Color.)

This is a screenshot of Dr. Pat Heffernan’s moment resistance for a doubly reinforced concrete beam worksheet.
Notice that he uses transparent figures (created and exported from PowerPoint) that look great on any worksheet background. He used the Image Command to insert them into Mathcad Prime. His transparent cartoon head in the header serves as his logo.
You can download his full worksheet alongside the full free replay of our Mathcad for Civil Engineers webinar.

Here's a personal story you should take as a cautionary tale when working with large images: The initial Advanced Controls worksheet collection had massive file sizes for each worksheet, because the Mathcad template that I had the team use to create the collection had an uncompressed, full-size version of Mathcad Prime 10's hero artwork. When I inserted the image into the template and shrunk it down, the image still maintains its full size and resolution while embedded. This is useful if you wanted to resize the image repeatedly and maintain its original quality, but for the purpose of the template, the worksheet was storing the full 5100 x 3300-pixel image (which is far larger than the size it was shrunken down to in the worksheet), and the default template was 13.4 MB as a result, driven entirely from that image. I solved this by resizing the image in a separate program to just the size I needed for the Mathcad template. Then I swapped in the full-resolution image with this just-as-needed image. This cut the file size of the Mathcad worksheets by about 95%, making the collection of worksheets much easier to share. You can watch those templates in action in the Advanced Controls Crash Course below.

OLE objects

Pros: Supports visualizing non-image file formats, such as PowerPoint slides; allows interactivity with embedded files
Cons: Does not support image files on your file system; does not support transparency

To insert an OLE Object, go to the Input/Output tab in the ribbon and select Insert Object. (You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + O.) I can identify two use cases for OLE Objects for the purpose of displaying visual content, which recently got a resolution increase starting with PTC Mathcad Prime 12.

You can embed all manner of non-image files, such as PowerPoints, Excel sheets, Word docs, and PDFs, and the embed will display the first page / slide / sheet. You can further open the whole document in its source application by double-clicking on it. (Note that the whole document is stored in the worksheet when sharing it, which increases the worksheet's file size.)

I've used this to fun effect for my Escape the Gem Tunnels Mathcad escape room game for the Mathcad Game Gallery 2024, but there are actual engineering use cases around embedding client requirement documents, such as in PowerPoint format, directly into your Mathcad sheet, or by embedding third-party CAD files for easy reference. Since you can Link the embedded file to your file system, changes made to the original file may also reflect in your Mathcad worksheet, maintaining associativity and ensuring your Mathcad worksheet remains up-to-date. Select your object and click Update Link from the Input/Output tab of the ribbon.

This is not an embedded image file; rather it is an embedded OLE Object of a PowerPoint slide outlining the design criteria for this I-Beam. If you double-clicked this in Mathcad, it would open up the full PowerPoint file.

The second use case is that you can create new files with the OLE workflow and have them embedded in your Mathcad worksheet. (Insert Object → Create New → Select Object Type; what is available is based on what programs you have installed on your system.) This includes not just PowerPoint (tip: change the slide size to be just big enough for your figure for a cleaner embed in Mathcad) but image creation tools such as Microsoft Paint (or “Paintbrush Picture” as it’s called in the Object Type selection). Warning for using Paint: Windows 11 Paint allows for layers in your image, but upon closing the object creation window and reopening it, the layers will all have been flattened. You will also lose all transparency with any type of OLE.

Personally, I would rather create the file separately and embed it with OLE, or insert it as an image if it's an image file, but this is an available option if you don't want to manage multiple different files in your system, or if you want to rapidly iterate. This is also the closest thing Mathcad has to an in-tool sketching option.

This is an OLE Object created by the “Create New” Insert Object workflow of creating a new image in Microsoft Paint directly in your Mathcad worksheet.
If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, you can draw normally, or you could use Paint’s Copilot generative AI image creation tool.
If you do use AI tools, be aware that AI is known to make mistakes and to check its work. In this case, it mislabeled width and length. (Width should be the shorter side.) OLE Objects with transparency are not rendered with transparency when embedded in Mathcad Prime.

Out of all these methods, OLE Objects have the unique property of providing you the option to not maintain the aspect ratio. Simply select your object (single-click) and click Preserve Aspect Ratio from the Input/Output tab (it is selected by default). This now gives you the ability to squish and contort your object. If you feel like you’ve made a mistake, you can click Reset Object Size. Clicking Preserve Aspect Ratio to re-enable it will also resize your object into its aspect ratio.

Excel component: Dynamic image display

Pros: Display a different image depending on other selections in your worksheet
Cons: Unofficial and unsupported workaround; images must be pre-programmed in a complicated way; may provide security risks; limited control over the aesthetic of the image; may be laggy in updating; Excel Component may corrupt and fail to work

PTC Mathcad Prime, as of Mathcad Prime 12’s release, does not have a built-in operator or function that allows you to display an image besides the three methods above. Legacy versions of Mathcad had the picture operator, which allowed you to insert a file path or image matrix (and these could be parametric variables) into the operator and have the image display in the worksheet.

However, thanks to enterprising Mathcad users, they’ve found a workaround. I’m passing this along not as an official endorsement, and there are no guarantees that this will work for you now or in the future. But with creative use of the Excel Component, you can use input conditions (in conjunction with Mathcad’s Combo Box) and Excel’s Name Manager to dynamically display an image. This involves creating an index table in a second sheet in your Excel Component, while your first sheet will have your image displayed with a large cell width and height.

Four uses for Mathcad combo boxes

How to set up a Combo Box and four use cases for them.

Read the Blog

Credit for this workaround goes to Perez from the PTC Community. He provides a worksheet example in his Community response that you can download, analyze, and replicate for your own work. (Going into the detailed mechanics of the embedded Excel Component is beyond the scope of this article, but I can make a separate article and/or video about it, if requested!) I made my own version of his work with three options:

This animation shows the headshots of the speakers for our discipline-based Mathcad webinars.
Dr. Heffernan and Mathcad for Civil Engineers were already mentioned earlier in this article.
For Dave Martin and Mathcad for Mechanical Engineers, click here. For Marius Pop and Mathcad for Electrical Engineers, click here.

The bigger your images and the more you change them, the slower your Mathcad worksheet will load the image change when you select a new input. However, I discovered a workaround: rather than rely on Mathcad’s recalculation, which will lag, just Save the worksheet (Ctrl + S) after you’ve made your selection. Saving will cause the new image to display instantly.

You can resize the Excel Component in your Mathcad worksheet to change what gets displayed inside, but it’s a finicky process. There is also a minimum horizontal space that the Excel Component has to occupy in your worksheet, which might not match up with the size of the image you want to display. (There are workarounds you can do to make this prettier on your Mathcad worksheet, like turning off Excel’s gridlines and setting the Mathcad Worksheet Background Color to white.)

Conclusion

PTC Mathcad supports a range of options for adding visual content to your worksheets and your template files. We recommend using the Image command in most cases, with OLE Objects as needed. With the right use of the right methods, your images will add to the aesthetic, branding, readability, and documentation of your worksheets.