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14-Alexandrite
July 28, 2025
Solved

How to show grid lines in Mathcad Prime plots?

  • July 28, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 1964 views

Hi everyone,

A customer of mine recently encountered a question while using Mathcad Prime. They created a 2D plot using the Insert Chart function (as shown in the image below), but couldn't find a way to display the grid lines (both x and y) in the chart.

I’m not very familiar with the plotting settings in Mathcad Prime, so I’d appreciate any help. Is there a setting or option to enable axis grid lines in a chart?

Thanks in advance for your support!

Best regards,
Lan

Best answer by Werner_E

The picture does not show a Chart Component (Ribbon Math - Chart Component) but rather a Prime native 2D-Plot (Ribbon Plots - Insert Plot - XY-Plot).

Unfortunately Prime's native plots are missing a lot of basic features like labels, second y-axis and ... grid lines.

Instead of adding the missing features PTC had decided to integrate a third party module which provides some of these features.

This module has its own sever drawbacks, though. Its badly integrated (Chart Component), extremely slow and awkward to handle, does not scale according to the windows zoom set (an issue when using high resolution with a small size monitor) and does not even support units (IMHO an absolute no-go for a Mathcad/Prime addon).

So your customer has two options: Either using the Chart component if it fits his needs or use one of the workarounds which were posted here in the forum a couple of times which create gridlines as an additional trace.

Some links: 

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Mathcad/In-MCD-Prime-4-0-is-there-any-way-to-add-gridlines-to-plots/m-p/86492/highlight/true#M34243

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Mathcad/Grid-on-a-2D-Plot/m-p/672767/highlight/true#M190679

 

A third option would be to simulate grid lines by using the feature to manually add horizontal and vertical markers. As these would have to be added and formatted one by one this method would only be acceptable if a small number of lines suffices.

 

BTW, looking at the picture you posted I would strongly advise your customer to take advantage of a main feature of Prime and add units to his calculations.

1 reply

Werner_E25-Diamond IAnswer
25-Diamond I
July 28, 2025

The picture does not show a Chart Component (Ribbon Math - Chart Component) but rather a Prime native 2D-Plot (Ribbon Plots - Insert Plot - XY-Plot).

Unfortunately Prime's native plots are missing a lot of basic features like labels, second y-axis and ... grid lines.

Instead of adding the missing features PTC had decided to integrate a third party module which provides some of these features.

This module has its own sever drawbacks, though. Its badly integrated (Chart Component), extremely slow and awkward to handle, does not scale according to the windows zoom set (an issue when using high resolution with a small size monitor) and does not even support units (IMHO an absolute no-go for a Mathcad/Prime addon).

So your customer has two options: Either using the Chart component if it fits his needs or use one of the workarounds which were posted here in the forum a couple of times which create gridlines as an additional trace.

Some links: 

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Mathcad/In-MCD-Prime-4-0-is-there-any-way-to-add-gridlines-to-plots/m-p/86492/highlight/true#M34243

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Mathcad/Grid-on-a-2D-Plot/m-p/672767/highlight/true#M190679

 

A third option would be to simulate grid lines by using the feature to manually add horizontal and vertical markers. As these would have to be added and formatted one by one this method would only be acceptable if a small number of lines suffices.

 

BTW, looking at the picture you posted I would strongly advise your customer to take advantage of a main feature of Prime and add units to his calculations.

Haydena14-AlexandriteAuthor
14-Alexandrite
July 28, 2025

Dear Werner_E

 

Thank you for your reply.

I tried adding two equations into a plot, and both curves display correctly. However, I noticed that one of the curves doesn’t respond to any style changes, such as dashed lines, color adjustments, or line thickness modifications.

Could you help me understand why this happens?
Might it be related to how the equation is defined, the data type, or units?

I’m currently using Mathcad Prime 10.
Thank you in advance for your support!

 

BR

Lan

ttokoro
21-Topaz I
21-Topaz I
July 28, 2025

Make number of plots <=5000, you can see the line style.

If 50000> you can see another change.

image.pngimage.png

t.t.