Mathcad has many advantages, but one serious downside is the amount of work required to set it up to run multiple cases. I either have to set up everything as a function and then setup the calling of that function - or Vectorize everything but that can be hard to do as well as difficult to visualize if I have many inputs. There is a better way. A competitive product (Engineering Equation Solver - EES) utilizes a feature called parametric tables. You write your code as a once-through calculation - something mathcad is good at. Then on a separate tab you have an excel-like table where you can define different input values and get the different outputs. So, I can very easily run 5, 10, or 1000 cases without all the hassel Mathcad puts me through. Fast, easy, virtually foolproof and very, very useful.
Example: You have a calculation where you have diameter as an input. You write your code for D=1.0 m and get a result. Maybe you are interested in a pressure P2 so you get P2 = answer. On the parametric table, you simply enter D = (0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0)m, and it gives you P2 = ans1, ans2, ans3, ans4, asn5. There you have a variety of answers for different inputs, no modication to the calculation required and everything is nice and neat in a table. In the mathcad world each column would need to be a vector so it can be plotted.
