Mathcad Tips

Calculating the trajectory of a baseball, with air resistance.

Relive the Magic with MathcadUse the attached worksheet to generate your own fireworks display in Mathcad.

As a product manager, customer feedback is essential in developing our product. What we do well is nice to hear but what we don’t do well is what drives our thinking when determining what to put in each release. On a recent Pragmatic Marketing course I was introduced to the saying “As a product developer your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.” This is something we’ve been saying to each other on the Mathcad team for the past few months. We have ideas about what we want to do with Mathcad, many good (and some bad, which get shot down pretty quickly) but ultimately the people who should be deciding what our product should do are the people who buy it and use it. It’s a waste of resources to put something in the product, even something that seems incredibly interesting to us, if it isn’t useful to our customers.At the end of August I visited several customers on the west coast. I was joined by our regional application engineer for the area. Between us we presented both the pow

As mentioned by Brent in a previous blog post, we’re committed to maintaining PTC Mathcad 15.0 for the foreseeable future to enable users who can’t yet migrate to the latest version of Mathcad to continue using the product and receiving support for it. We had a few last minute issues to chase down but PTC Mathcad 15.0 M040 was released yesterday. Along with several important bug fixes it brings support for Win 8.1 as well as an upgrade to MSXML 6.0, replacing the old MSXML 4.0 no longer supported by Microsoft. You can find it right now under the Mathcad section of the PTC Software Download page if you are active on Global Support.

PTC Mathcad is an ideal tool for recording the design knowledge for many different engineering problems. As engineering problems get more complex, the design knowledge grows in length and so does the Mathcad worksheet. The longer the Mathcad worksheet, the more regions it contains and for very large worksheets that contain hundreds of regions the general performance of document operations can become an issue. This is something that a number of customers have raised as an issue with Mathcad Prime and is something we want to address.For the last year, while PTC Mathcad Prime 3.1 functionality was being implemented, our development team has been working on refactoring how PTC Mathcad worksheets are structured and displayed in an attempt to greatly increase the performance of larger worksheets. Operations like adding lines and pages of space, opening and closing areas, changing page formatting options, copy and pasting content – the general functionality we all use when navigating a Mathca

Worksheet corresponding to this week's PTC Mathcad blog post: "Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle All the WAV Files"This worksheet will generate a WAV file of a simple rendition of "Jingle Bells", as performed by PTC Mathcad.

This is the worksheet used in the blog, Audible Illusions with PTC Mathcad Programming.

Creo Parametric 2.0 integration with Mathcad Prime 3.0.     (view in My Videos)

Please see the attached examples in PTC Mathcad worksheets.

In Mathcad 15.0, we can use the command "Hide Keywords", "Hide left-hand side" and "View Evaluation As > Default, Right shaft, Equal sign" with RMB.But in Mathcad Prime 2.0 we cannot find them again.

Got a great Mathcad story to share? Interested in showcasing your Mathcad chops? Consider this to be your official invitation to present your expertise to your peers. We have select opportunities for presenters – we’re looking for Mathcad Champions – for a variety of slots. New Mathcad users and longtime experts have repeatedly told us that they find peer-to-peer presentations extremely valuable. Our presenters benefit too, from creating new networking opportunities to establishing themselves as thought-leaders in their organizations and industries. Right now we have openings for brief monthly webinars as well as 45-minute speaking slots at PTC’s Mathcad Virtual Conference scheduled for autumn 2012. If you’re a Mathcad Champion, or want to become one, email us at - and tell us: Your idea or topic for your presentationWhat your audience would like about itYour discipline and industry Your Mathcad skill level (novice, intermediate, expert)If your idea is selected by the Mathcad team, we’

Create 2 polar plot for the functions cos(x), cos(x)^(-1) and cos(x)^(-2). Set the line trace style to full line, the result plot for the cos(x)^(-2) is invalid, other line trace valid.

Hi Expert,Here is a piecewise continuos function. I can get the two root by root function. But the third root with an error "The function values on the end points must be of opposite signs." How can I set he third and fourth arguments of root function?

Hello everyone,Me and some of my marketing colleagues have been thinking about new ways of doing marketing – but using the tools we already have at hand and many of you are also using today.We want to do something beyond sending you offers by email and we thought there also should be something “in it” for you… So here’s what we have agreed to – it will be only relevant for those of you who are using Twitter – or plan on using it.We have created this Twitter list called the "Mathcad Enthusiasts" and you can find it here: http://twitter.com/PTC_Mathcad/mathcad-enthusiastsThis is a pretty cool list.  If you manage to get "on" it, you will be automatically entered in our monthly sweepstake.How do I get "on" this list?You simply need to retweet this URL at least once: http://bit.ly/TryPrime.Simply create a tweet with a call to action such as"Check out the Mathcad #Prime free trial at http://bit.ly/TryPrime" or"See what’s new in Mathcad #Prime and download the free trial at http://bit.l

This is a sample worksheet created by Tom Marshall who we had interviewed for our "Meet the Mathcad Users" series of articles on the Mathcad Blog.We asked him:Can you share a sample worksheet with us?"I am tempted to provide a fancy complex worksheet that would be impressive looking and show off lots of features. But instead, I'm going to give you a simple worksheet that illustrates why I am such a faithful user of Mathcad. This is an example of how I use Mathcad in my daily work.  I made this little worksheet recently while on the phone with a client. The goal was to determine if they should increase the number of render engines (software tools to construct digital images in preparation for printing) to keep up with a new printer they were adding to the workflow.Instead of creating a lengthy analysis project, I simply opened Mathcad while I had the client on the phone, asked a few questions and was able to build a simple worksheet that provided enough information for my client to

Labels what you might ask?Labels are a new feature in Mathad Prime 1.0 that allow you to assign different meanings to the same character. A label is a way of designating a math type such as variables, constants and units. A label allows you to format all units, say to a certain look.We developed labels because sometimes you might want to use say "m" for a meter unit, but then that prevents you from using "m" for a variable. Labels allow you to do both.>> Read the full article on the Mathcad blog

These are the winning worksheets from our "Horseback riding with Mathcad" contest that we had run on the Mathcad blog in May/June 2011.To recap, the problem was:An army 40 miles long advances 40 miles while a messenger on horseback rides from the rear of the column to the front and back to the rear. How far has the messenger ridden? Assume that the messenger travels at a constant speed and his direction of travel is either parallel (or opposite) to the movement of the army.For this puzzle, however, we received only two correct solutions. I suppose you guys have been very busy with your real work and rather spent time doing more serious calculations with Mathcad, so I take it as a good sign.We will be running a new puzzle over the summer months, so stay tuned for more...Thanks to everyone who participated and congratulations to the winners, Otfried Georg from Germany and Richard Jackson from the US!Cheers!Bettina

These are the winning worksheets from our "Fly swatting with Mathcad" contest that we had run on the Mathcad blog in March/April 2011.To recap, the problem was:A fly is sitting at a distance of h from a man with a fly swatter. At time t=0 the fly is pursued by the man who has a constant acceleration of 1. The fly flies in a straight line away from the man with an acceleration of 0.6t. What is the largest initial separation, h, for which the man can intercept the fly?Here are the winners:Alan Stevens for providing five different ways to arrive at the solution and solving it in both Mathcad Prime 1.0 and Mathcad 15. His two best solutions are provided below in both formats.Stuart Bruff for solving it both symbolically and numerically and illustrating the problem with plots and a slider control. Note: the worksheet is in Mathcad 11 format, the slider doesn't work in Mathcad 15.0.Fred Kohlhepp for providing an animation.Valery Ochkov for providing the correct solution and two plots.Andrew

Hello everyone,I would like to draw your attention to an article I posted on the Mathcad blog today. It's a short, interview-style case study I did with a Mathcad user. I am looking to do more of these stories, so if you think you have something interesting to share with your peers, please send a direct message to me here on  Community!Thanks!BettinaHere's an excerpt of the story - You can read the full story here: http://blogs.ptc.com/bid/36759/I-stumbled-upon-some-math-today[...] I recently stumbled upon the Math Encounters Blog by Mark Biegert.It's full of stories of everyday math – such as "Magic Number Analysis – 'Money Factor' in Auto Leasing" or "Designing a stairway for my cabin" – and many of them involve Mathcad.Of course, I immediately thought of pulling him into my own blogging plans. So I left a comment on his blog asking him to contact me and we arranged a phone call. The call turned out to be rather short, but not because he didn't have much to say… on the contrary,

This Mathcad worksheet was submitted by Eva Landsoght (NL) who is currently writing her Ph.D. thesis at Delft University of Technology.The worksheet was created in Mathcad 14.0 and shows a calculation of beam shear and punching shear strength of a concrete slab according to Eurocode 2 (EN 1992-1-1:2005).A short interview with Eva is available in our "Meet the Mathcad Users" series on the Mathcad Blog. Take a look, she may even have a tip to share