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anthonyQueen11-Garnet
11-Garnet
January 14, 2017
Question

Mathcad resources, books et al. - crises without recovery?

  • January 14, 2017
  • 4 replies
  • 8235 views

A dozen years ago,  Mathsoft.com (see Waybackmacine) listed a section of mathcad-related books. I counted around 40+, around half or more in the last 5 years (2000-05).

I recall, distinctly, that there were at that time many websites with mathcad tutorials, showing and offering .mcd files to download and learn. Calculus, differential equations, economics  had their mathcad experts that offered plenty of inspiring work.

Now there is very little left, and that little is often just a fraction of the material that was created and made available more than ten years ago.

So the landscape nowadays looks very different, unfortunately. I hardly recall 1 book about mathcad (Prime or not), in the last five years or so. I came across recently with the resources of one of the most popular authors of math textbooks (ronlarson.com). He makes available resources and files for mathematica, maple, matlab. But nothing about mathcad, even if  it seems a much better tool for  tutorial purposes.

I feel that without such resources the future of mathcad will not look good. I do not know if this is just my impression. I hope to be wrong because of I miss something.

Contrary to the above pessimism, I should say that this forum is very well kept and supported by several experts that offer help. I still fear may not be enough!

Just a proposal: could PTC provide a page that connects to the other valuable resources about mathcad around the net, and signal any book or material that makes use of mathcad?  

Thanks.

    4 replies

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    RichardJ19-Tanzanite
    19-Tanzanite
    January 14, 2017
    I feel that without such resources the future of mathcad will not look good. I do not know if this is just my impression. I hope to be wrong because of I miss something.

    Unfortunately, I don't think you missed anything.

    Just a proposal: could PTC provide a page that connects to the other valuable resources about mathcad around the net, and signal any book or material that makes use of mathcad? 

    Thanks.

    As you note, we had such a resource list. PTC could have kept it up to date, but instead they chose to throw most of it away, and put the rest behind a wall so that you have to may maintenance to PTC to see it. I doubt that will change.

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    anthonyQueen11-GarnetAuthor
    11-Garnet
    January 16, 2017

    Thanks for the feedback.

    Does it mean that the old valuable forum http://collab.mathsoft.com/~Mathcad2000/ shown below is available only under a maintenance ticket?

    Making it offline for the rest of us (or all of us) was not a long run investment!

    Collab.mathsoft.com.png

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    RichardJ19-Tanzanite
    19-Tanzanite
    January 16, 2017

    The Collab is completely dead. Some of it was migrated to these forums, but not all.

    Aside from the Collab mathsoft also had a resource center with many worksheets, sorted by topic. That's what I was referring to.

    Edit: This: http://web.archive.org/web/20040804121505/http://www.mathcad.com/Library/

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      mfrench13-Aquamarine
      13-Aquamarine
      January 20, 2017

      As something of aside, part of the problem might be that Mathcad sheets are tough to put into a book.

      I'm at a university and write books as part of my job.  I use Mathcad V15 and generally print to a high resolution PDF and do a screen shot.  Then, I trim the screen shot and save as a graphics file.  It stinks, but it works.  When I called PTC to ask if there was a better option, they said they didn't know of anything better than what I was doing.  Really? 

      Future books will have more MATLAB and less Mathcad because the graphics look more professional.

      Prime will probably, eventually be up to the job.  Prime 3.1 doesn't have enough plot formatting functions to produce publishable graphics.  If I understand the road map correctly, Prime 5 should largely solve the problem. 

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      Fred_Kohlhepp23-Emerald I
      23-Emerald I
      January 20, 2017

      Mark French wrote:

      Prime will probably, eventually be up to the job.  Prime 3.1 doesn't have enough plot formatting functions to produce publishable graphics.  If I understand the road map correctly, Prime 5 should largely solve the problem.

      Don't hold your breath!

      The advertisement for Prime 4.0 is that it "will be as capable as version 15."

      And there have been complaints about Mathcad since I started watching the Collaboratory.

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      anthonyQueen11-GarnetAuthor
      11-Garnet
      January 20, 2017

      PTC bought Mathcad more than 10 years ago, in April 2006.

      At that time at Mathsoft (i.e. at Mathcad) were employed 130 people. The transaction was ufficially of $63M. The statement of the acquisition claimed that mathcad was actively used by 250,000+ professionals, and more than 2000 universities.

      In recent Mathcad advs I can still see reported the 250,000+ figure but no more figures on universities. Obviusly PTC focuses its efforts elsewhere. If you are not a Creo user this arises concerns.

      In University students are trained. And if a tool is not considered for such a purpose, it would be very unlikely that those students will pick up the tool later in their lives, at work or at home.

      Without much training in the educational institutions, the overall resources around the net and elsewhere will be less abundant and less available. And this is what this post is about. Academics and teachers are usually the authors of many training resources. And in Machad's landscape this has become a rarity in recent years.
      It is not just a matter that Matlab (or Mathematica or Maple) does better this and that. It is a matter that at Amazon there are dozens of updated books about these apps, from starters to experts, and almost no one  about Mathcad.

      I can see that PTC has its own university. I do not know how many people are enrolled in it. But I found disconcerting that instead of promoting at least the older resources that were available, PTC removed them away from the general public.

      Without resources will no be party. And that party according to PTC in 2006 was worth in revenus 20M.

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        ValeryOchkov24-Ruby IV
        24-Ruby IV
        January 24, 2017

        ptc.png

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        Dmitri_K1-Visitor
        1-Visitor
        January 25, 2017

        Let me introduce my free e-course Calculus I with Mathcad Prime 3 Labs on Udemy. Videos are in Russian, but all Mathcad Labs are in English. This course is based upon this MIT course.

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          anthonyQueen11-GarnetAuthor
          11-Garnet
          January 27, 2017

          @Dimitri, many thanks for the info of your interesting course and for its links. I did know about it. I am not Russian, but I enjoy Russian material. Russians in the past decades were very active with Mathcad.

          Probably I am asking too much, but some of us still use Mathcad-normal version, and having files in .mcd (better!) or .xmcd will be very helpful. This is particularly true as above has been said in edu places. Anyway, thanks again and looking forward at Calculus II and III courses!!

          It is a pity that PTC does not offer a webpage to collect these links of Mathcad material.

          @ValeryOchkov. Indeed, PTC stock has gone particularly well in the recent years, as the graph shows. However its balance sheet showed a loss in net income during the financial year ended in September 2016.

          PTC_figures.png

          Unfortunately -as you may agree- not always the fortunes of the company means automatically the fortune of all of its products. Looking at PTC revenues by industry (see above table)  I guess that Mathcad as a standalone product is hidden in the last two “industries” of the list. So it is a tiny PTC market. From the above figures, one can understand also what PTC is trying to do: integrate Mathcad in other apps that cover the first part of the above list, rather than develop Mathcad as an independent math tool.

          I do not blame them, but the above list also seems to confirm that education and university is unfortunately an almost absent sector in their market. My hope is that they will sell the classic Mathcad as independent tool to other software houses, while integrating Mathcad Prime in their main software, as they are doing.

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          Fred_Kohlhepp23-Emerald I
          23-Emerald I
          January 27, 2017

          anthony Queen wrote:

            I guess that Mathcad as a standalone product is hidden in the last two “industries” of the list.

          I don't believe this is true.  I work in "Aerospace and Defense."  I've been "pushing" Mathcad for a long time, it's a challenge because the new engineers come out of school used to Matlab, and that's what they reach for.  Still, Mathcad is a fine engineering tool, so the industries where engineers are heavily employed should be considered as significant revenue sources.  (Many companies specify 3D modeling software from PTC competitors.)  I cannot get my company to abandon CATIA for CREO even if Mathcad worked seamlessly and automatically in PTC's modeling software.

          Their absolute neglect of Mathcad (and their failure to give it away free to students and professors) is the reason for the dismal performance of Mathcad sales.

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