Request: Non-live Math in Text Blocks

When it is said that mathcad is a good tool for documenting calculations, we are talking about technical documentation. This in contrary to the kind of documentation a teacher demands from his students - showing all intermediate steps how to derive the solution, the end formula or the most simplified expression.

In the ed biz you would like to be able to tell Mathcad something like "take that equation and subtract 2*x from both sides", perhaps with an added "but don't simplify too much". Unfortunately thats not possible and one has to accept that education is not the programs main intent.

As to your askin for non-live math, Mathcad can serve. If you type an equation you would use the boolean equal sign anyway and that math reagion will not change or anything if you don't apply a symbolic solve or something like that. Same situation as using the equation editor in word (apart from the latter producing optical prettier results). One other thing which goes in the direction of non-live math is disabling a region. While the black box in the upper left corner (or the completely greyed out font color in Prime) may not look that pretty, it does the job you demand.

As of the example you provided

For this to work one would have to be able to express equations like: expression1 + expression1 = expression3 - expression4

I see no reason why you shouldn't type it in exactly that way in mathcad (using the boolean equal sign). MC will not change it.

If a misunderstood your intent - sorry, maybe you can provide a more concrete example of what you need to achieve.

BTW, if for some reason it is necessary to use Words equation editor for some kind of extended documentation, probably it would be more convenient to insert that equations in the MC worksheet, so there is only one file to maintain.

Which version of Mathcad are you using? What you want is possible in MC15, but math in text blocks is currently not allowed in Prime. I believe that it will be possible in Prime 3.0 though.