Save Mathcad 5.0 to 4.0

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@Joop wrote:

Dear all,

 

I started with Mathcad 5.0, but found that I cannot read the 5.0 files with Mathcad 4.0. Is there any possibility to convert the 5.0 files to 4.0?

 

regards,

 

Joop Baltussen

 

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Silly as it may sound, but the answer is "no".

PTC in its wisdom (some may say - inability) has decided that their different versions should be as incompatible as possible. Probably they see it already as a big concession that Prime 5 can read Prime 4 files.

While its normal in the software world that a version 4 can't read a version 5 file, its really strange and stupid that a version 5 is not able to save a file in version 4 format (omitting all feature which would be new to version 5 by doing so).

So the only way to make a P5 file readable in P4 is to retype it or to have P4 and P5 installed both on a machine. Then you can open the file in P5 and copy it to an empty sheet which you open/create in P4.

But it wouldn't be PTC if this would work flawless in one go - you would have to copy every region by its own, region after region ....maybe PTC means "Pretty Taxing Company" ?

Well, you're not limited to copy region by region.

You can create an Area in your Prime 5 sheet, copy (in one or a few strokes) all your regions into that Area, then collapse it and copy it as a single item over to a sheet open in Prime 4 (which, as Werner points out must be installed on the same machine).This works often, but no guarantee... (Beware, it's PTC sofware !) it may also lead to Prime 4 crashing. So be that your stuff works in Prime 4 before ditching the Prime 5 stuff....!

Success!
Luc