Skip to main content
J
JD_20664893-Newcomer
3-Newcomer
January 22, 2026
Question

Ideas for improvement to Mathcad Prime

  • January 22, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 374 views

We often deal with mathcad calculations that are 100 pages or more.  These can be unwieldly to navigate and check especially for those that did not develop the mathcad calculations.  One thing that could greatly improve the formating of mathcad would be to have the ability to have something like the tabs in an excel sheet.  Another way to do this would be to have the ability to have chapters or sections that could be tabbed through.  If it was done with chapters or sections, there could be a table of contents page with links to each section.  I know that mathcad had the ability to hide calculation regions but this is not nearly as user friendly.  This is a wish list item that I think would really improve the user interface for many users. 

 

2 replies

W
Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
January 22, 2026

In my experience, Prime documents that are this long tend to become so slow and unresponsive when editing that it is almost impossible to continue working on them—but this certainly also depends on the specific content of the sheets and the complexity of the calculations they contain. But that would probably be an important problem that would have to be solved first.

 

You may be interested to know that an automatically generated table of contents is being considered for Prime 13 or later.

It is not known whether this TOC will contain hyperlinks and could therefore also be also used for navigation.

Werner_E_0-1769108862759.png

 

If you are a paying customer with an active maintenance you may also consider to suggest an idea  here  or vote up an already existing idea. Not sure if it would help. though 😉

 

M
mvenich14-Alexandrite
14-Alexandrite
January 23, 2026

 Frankly, Mathcad is being left behind by competitors. From the candidate feature list for Mathcad Prime 13, Maple Flow already has autosave, align regions and automatic toc (with hyperlinks). Units entry isn't as smooth, but they tell me they're working on Mathcad like entry of units

. 

W
Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
January 23, 2026
@mvenich wrote:

 Frankly, Mathcad is being left behind by competitors. From the candidate feature list for Mathcad Prime 13, Maple Flow already has autosave, align regions and automatic toc (with hyperlinks). Units entry isn't as smooth, but they tell me they're working on Mathcad like entry of units

. 

Oh, Prime is not only left behind by its competitors but also by 20+ years old legacy Mathcad. We had no automatic TOC (we had the ability to create nice hyperlinked ebooks, though) but we sure had autosave and region alignment.

Admittedly, Prime has a few improvements that I really appreciate. For example, the easy entry of matrices, the Ctrl-J feature in programs, and the unit support in odesolve. The first two support a better workflow, which is essential.
And while I think that the symbolic engine is not on par with the old mupad in Mathcad 14/15 (and sure not on the level of Maple in MC11) it nonetheless surpasses muPad now and then and I have the impression that this is a part PTC is really working on and making continuous noticeable progress.

But then... scrolling in larger matrices, the completely botched implementation of copy & paste, the poor features of the 2D plots, the unfortunate integration of the third-party Chart component module, and then the quality of the 3D plots, which is definitely beneath the dignity of any hobby programmer.
Not to mention missing features such as the aforementioned autosave or region alignments.
In return, the next version will offer the option to change the background color—oh no, not freely from a palette, we will only have the choice between white and gray. Wow!

We will have to wait to see how the promised improvements on the native 2D plots are actually implemented. From the announcement it looks like we are at least approaching old Mathcad now in this respect with version 12 of Prime. I guess the formatting abilities of the 2D plots still will not live up to the ones we had back in the good old days, though. We had much better control over the look, more different line widths and could set the size of the line and the dot/symbol independent from each other.

Werner_E_0-1769182961083.png

 

J
JD_20664893-NewcomerAuthor
3-Newcomer
January 28, 2026

Another simple addition to the user interface would be the addition of bookmarks.  These could be tick marks or tabs attached to the slider bar that, when clicked would jump to a specific point in the calculation sheet.  This simple addition could really improve working times when having to bounce between inputs and outputs....

J
JD_20664893-NewcomerAuthor
3-Newcomer
January 28, 2026

Another nice addition to the user interface would be the ability to trace dependents and precedence.  In Mathcad 15 I was able to cut and paste variables into the find feature then find where they were used.  Perhaps I just don't know how to use this feature properly in Mathcad prime but when I cut and paste the variables, the variable with subscripts... doesn't display properly in the find and so it can't find where the variable is used automatically.

L
LucMeekes23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
January 28, 2026

"but when I cut and paste the variables, the variable with subscripts... doesn't display properly in the find and so it can't find"

(Just some of) your prayers are being heard. See the overview of features planned for Prime 12, in Werner's post of 2026-01-23 04:45 PM above here.

But I'll fully agree that it should not have taken PTC a full 12 iterations to implement this feature properly when (real) Mathcad, Prime's predecessor, had this already properly functioning in the past century.

 

Success!
Luc

Terms & ConditionsCookie settingsAccessibility statement