Promising performance data from early PTC Mathcad Prime 4.0 development builds

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 Mathcad worksheet.

I recently reviewed an early development build of PTC Mathcad Prime 4.0 and the performance increase for these document operations is in many cases tens of times faster. For one extremely large and densely populated test worksheet we use, area expand/collapse times came down from 30 seconds to just over a second, adding a line of space went from 10 seconds to less than a second. These are extremely promising results. We plan on running a limited Alpha test for users of large worksheets to provide feedback on the usability these changes in PTC Mathcad Prime 4.0 provide but on the basis of the builds so far, the performance benefits should be huge.