Ioana Cernat is a PTC Mathcad Application Engineer (AE), living in Romania. She works closely with the quality and AE teams inside PTC. When she’s not working on her PhD in Risk Modelling, she enjoys reading, travelling, flying, extreme sports, and playing the piano.
If you’ve read or watched anything about PTC Mathcad Prime, you already know there are loads of features to help you perform, share, and protect engineering calculations. Downloading the free trial of PTC Mathcad can help you explore the software for your own projects. Be sure to check out these five features that will make everything easier.
Solve Blocks
Obviously, your calculations are not always straightforward, sequential calculations. Often, you’ll need to do some solving of some sort.
Whether you’re looking for a solution to a system of equations, maximizing/minimizing a complicated function according to a set of constraints, or solving a system of Ordinary Differential Equations, the Solve Block feature uses incredibly powerful solvers that will save you time, frustration, and errors.
Learn more about Mathcad’s Solve Blocks
Learn more about the Solve Block structure in Mathcad and its use for solving systems of equations.
Read the BlogProgramming
Before you throw your hands up and say, “I’m not a programmer!” just hear me out. We call it programming, but really it’s a set of logical statements that help you add a ton of flexibility and power to your calculations. Mathcad's Programming operators allow you to set conditions (if/else statements) to your mathematical logic, such that a different calculation will occur depending on the given situation. They also enable you to iterate through calculations using For and While loops. And, in keeping with the modus operandi of Mathcad, programming blocks use natural math notation and units like the rest of the worksheet, so check that out as well!
A Mathcad Program for Generating Prime Numbers
See and download an example of how Mathcad's programming operators can be used in tandem.
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Chart Component
To create plots with enhancements for technical papers and presentations, use the Chart Component. The Chart Component is an embedded charting app. You can embed one or several chart components in your worksheet.
The Chart Component differs from basic 2D native plots found in the Plots tab in important ways. The Chart Component includes custom formatting of the X and Y axes (thickness and color), custom formatting of axes’ tick-mark values (font, size, color), axes labels with formatting (font, size, color), legend, major and minor gridlines, a secondary y-axis, and formatting options for the chart object itself, including frames and colors for the chart.
Mathcad Graphing Options: XY Plots and Chart Components
Learn more about the charts you can make with the Chart Component, and Mathcad’s other plots.
Check Out the Blog
Combo Boxes
Imagine selecting an item from a drop-down list and automatically setting variables based on the item choice – do this with Combo Boxes in Mathcad! Automatically update calculations by selecting a different item from your Combo Box drop-down. This is quite useful when you need to change a set of values to explore different configurations or do a trade-off analysis; for example, Combo Boxes are especially handy for assessing calculations using different materials.
Four Uses for Mathcad Combo Boxes
We explain how to make Combo Boxes and more use cases for them.
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Areas
If you’re relatively new to Mathcad, you might not think to use Collapsible Areas in your worksheets. These areas can hold content that can be collapsed and/or protected.
Areas are super useful – use them to protect function definitions and then call those functions in other parts of your worksheet. Another common use case is to hide content that you don’t want to display in your distributable engineering documents (content that is collapsed when printed will be hidden in the printed document).
6 Ways to Make Your Mathcad Worksheets Publication Ready
Collapsed & expanded areas are just one of Mathcad’s tools to optimize your worksheets for sharing.
Read Other Tips Here
Check out these features now
Again, the trial version of Mathcad is entirely unlocked for 30 days, giving you some time to explore the benefits that come with engineering calculation software.
A quick note for legacy Mathcad users – The Standalone Converter
Legacy users who are transitioning to Mathcad Prime may need to migrate data into the new Mathcad version. You can do this with the Standalone Converter, which converts legacy Mathcad worksheets to PTC Mathcad Prime worksheets without the need to install the legacy version of the application.
Moving from Legacy Mathcad to Mathcad Prime
For users of legacy Mathcad who need guidance and best practices moving to Mathcad Prime, read this.
Worksheets Conversion Guide
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