Chart Numbering Illegible in Worksheet View

[GeoffD]

The axis tick mark numbering on a Chart in the worksheet view can be illegible when first generated. Even when you max zoom 400% things remain illegible, regardless of whether the chart is open or closed :

You can increase the font to 20 within the open chart to improve visibility:-  

- But it would improve the user's experience if the font could automatically be sized to achieve visibility in worksheet view at generation?

[Old-MCAD-User]

Agreed, the choice of subscript sizes appears to have been done by those with 20:10 vision or a 50-inch 4K TV/display. 

Even with increasing the 'zoom' level it is hard to see some of the subscripts and other text for indices, etc. Even as I type here, I cannot see the difference between a 'period' and a 'comma'. Are there no internal reviews of legibility? Or do internal reviews get ignored like the customer complaints and ideas? 

[GeoffD]

Hi, Having made the long journey from MCAD1-MCAD15 to P8 over more years than I care to remember and have gone through endless frustrations over Prime's limitations I have made the transition and use it 24x7 only dipping back into MCAD15 to find old programmes. Whilst a lot of effort has been expended in getting the package to look prettier - there are some basic usability issues (extensively reported) that still need to be addressed. I think they are aware of these things and are trying - but it's difficult to match the evolved state of M15 when starting from scratch. Faced with the clunky line entry alternatives I will stick with it until a competitor comes along that provides the capabilities of Mathematica/Wolfram with the free-hand manipulation of concepts, readable equations and layout of Prime.

[Old-MCAD-User]

Thanks, @GeoffD , I have also been trying to run Prime 7.0 instead of v15, but some of my worksheets are completely destroyed with hundreds of "?" marks, so I have to do a mad rush to print all of my worksheets to .pdf so I know what the worksheet 'should' look like and figure out how to proceed. What's equally frustrating is that after reporting this to technical support I was contacted and seemed to have a good lead for potentially getting help, but he has gone radio silent ever since. There is so much potential for PTC to incorporate some very basic features from v15 that would do them a lot of good in the customer satisfaction (and consequently customer efficiency & productivity), my manager would get results faster if I didn't have these well known and documented issues, as you also referred to.

[GeoffD]

Ah!, Yes, I remember the harrowing experience of converting my beautiful M15 files into a shredded mess. P8 is an improvement over P7 on the conversion experience so it's worth updating. Despite the mangling, pretty much all of the converted files ran OK and numerically agreed with the M15 version leaving me with the re-prettification process - but as 99% of the files were for my own use this was a relatively quick process.

Probably the worst "user experience" was in converting solve blocks - where your logically arranged comments and equations were spattered somewhere else. Also, my carefully thought-out dual-axis graphs were mashed to unreadable single-axis converts - the Chart option (as opposed to the plot tab) gives you improved control over the graphs (with dual axes - but no 3D option yet) but its a manually intensive process of flicking between loads of menu tabs.

But once working 100% in Prime workarounds for most of its limitations can be found. In fact, my latest exploits to extract data from a programme while it is running (to avoid having to wait until the end to find it was total rubbish) has been really useful and something I couldn't do before. So there are upsides - eventually,

[Old-MCAD-User]

Thanks for the tiny light at the end of the tunnel...unfortunately, I have no idea when my company will upgrade to Prime 8.0, it is not in the foreseeable future that I am aware of. 

[GeoffD]

I would check with your IT folk - if you have a licence for P7 then you should be able to download P8 straightaway - the licence fee is usually a yearly thing - so if P7 is working OK today you should be able to get P8 today without paying anything more - unless there is a more complicated contractual arrangement?  

[Old-MCAD-User]

Yes, we do have a very belabored system for it, it's a 'team' of people who handle the software licensing for network licenses like this. Had I known the massive number of problems and limitations with Prime, the conversion tool not working worth a hill of beans, etc. I would have made a solid case for getting a perpetual license of v15, but working double shifts as-is, wasn't enough to even address my v15 conversions.

[GeoffD]

I think PTC canned any chance of a perpetual V15 licence quite some time ago - and as the perpetual licence wouldn't provide fixes to cope with MS software updates a brick wall would eventually be hit. At least P8 should be a bit better than P7 and P9 next year looks a bit better still. 

[Old-MCAD-User]

They were giving our company the option for a v15 perpetual license, everyone but me and a few other hold-outs knew there were problems with the converter already, among the other ridiculous things that broke once they switched to Prime, like the graphing issues mentioned in this thread and others.