Producing professional looking documents

ptc-1371556 · ‎Oct 01, 2010

Hi

I do not know what is in Mathcad Prime so I am at a disadvantage. So my suggestions below are based on pushing Mathcad as it is now. Many suggestions have been forward over the years by many persons on how to advance and make more powerful the Mathcad programme and it would not take long for PTC to skim the old collaboratory to list them all.

1. I work with large data files and I find that Mathcad falls over if am not careful on how I structure the programmes. As time went by, the datafiles kept getting bigger and I know I will hit a complete limit very soon. It has something to do with the internal workings of Mathcad with regard to memory etc. Although Mathcad 15 is much better than Mathcad 14, both are slower and fall over sooner than Mathcad 11 which I still use for my primary work. So my suggestion is that Prime needs to fully work in 64-bit mode within Windows 7 in order to maximise both speed and capacity.

2. Mathcad is poor in producing professional looking documents to present to clients. This covers proper text-formatting under word-processing and also proper presentation of tables. Productivity will be much improved if I can bypass having to switch between Word & Excel & Mathcad. I continue to need Excel but I do not see a need to continue to rely on Word. Alvaro mentioned this as well in the past. So, for me, Prime needs to give high priority to include proper word-processing facilities and also to include better page layout options (in particular, the header / footer option in the existing Mathcad is very limited and also a need to allow for portrait / landscape modes in the same document).

3. I can live with the existing graphs as they cover the basics. But I regard it as very important that the parameters controlling the graph can be programmed by the user.

The basic idea behind Mathcad is really good and like using it. I have gotten used to Mathcad's quirks over the years. But it needs to be made more powerful so the user can do a lot more and it must be brought up to date take full advantage of 64-bit operating systems. I do not want to use what are glorified line-editors such as Maple or Mathematica but I will be under serious pressure to consider them in about a year's time to get past the restraints noted in 1. above (unless I can again find another way to re-structure my programmes to prolong the use of Mathcad).

Regards

David

MikeArmstrong · ‎Oct 03, 2010

2. Mathcad is poor in producing professional looking documents to present to clients. This covers proper text-formatting under word-processing and also proper presentation of tables. Productivity will be much improved if I can bypass having to switch between Word & Excel & Mathcad. I continue to need Excel but I do not see a need to continue to rely on Word. Alvaro mentioned this as well in the past. So, for me, Prime needs to give high priority to include proper word-processing facilities and also to include better page layout options (in particular, the header / footer option in the existing Mathcad is very limited and also a need to allow for portrait / landscape modes in the same document).

Have to disagree with this comment.

I would say Mathcad has more than sufficient features to produce a professional looking document. Calculations produced in Mathcad, if wrote properly, can be clean, elegant and generally similar to the standards/textbooks.

If no collapsed area's are used calculations can be followed by a non-Mathcad user - which is a massive advantage IMO.

Mike

ptc-1371556 · ‎Oct 05, 2010

Hi

Perhaps I was not specific enough in my paragraph 2. in my previous post. I am not concerned with the white-board part of the screen containing the programmes, calculations etc. So:

(a) The text regions have only an adequate but not a top ability for a quality layout. Text regions cannot do left & right justified text. If it is a right-justified text region, it does not properly line up on the righthand boundary especially when printed and this is especially the case if the font is italic. Text regions at present allow the user to select any font etc which is fine. But presentation quality documents need to also allow for user-selected line spacing (eg 1.20, 1.80 etc line spacing) and also enable the user to adjust the space between characters in a word. Such fine adjustments enable a report to look more attractive to the eye and be more readable. Professional printers and typesetters understand these points. Given that Mathcad already includes some word-processing features within its text regions, I am only suggesting that the word-processing features be expanded to include the above. I really do not see this as a big deal.

(b) In a similar way, the page layout only does a part job and I suggest could be improved without too much effort by Mathcad. The vertical depth of the header & footer and the space available between them on the page is inflexible and needs to be more easily adjusted by the user. Finally, I suggested that the worksheet enable mixed portrait & landscape modes when printed.

I regard the above changes, which do a bit more than what Mathcad already does now, would greatly improve its usability.

I would like to be able to do my calculations and present my results in a professional looking document to my clients, all within Mathcad. Having portrait / landscape mixed pages is really important for this. Having text regions that do a better layout of the words in the report is also important. The last two points mean I do not have to copy across to a word-processing package such as Word, which is slow and inefficient. It would also be nice to have presentable tables within Mathcad (there is none at present), rather than use Excel embedded in the Mathcard worksheet to do this as I currently do, but I can live with this as I make it work.

I understand most users of Mathcad are engineers etc and so they may think they do not need the extra page layout options, more powerful text regions etc but they possibly may not have not really thought about it. For example, would not the ability to have mixed portrait / landscape pages be really useful?

Finally, I have experimented and tried all sorts of ways of streamlining my use of Mathcad, Excel and Word. The obvious suggestion is to copy and paste/link results from Mathcad into the final report set up in a Word document. But this linking from Mathcad also has a problem. If you copy and paste / link say a graph in a Mathcad worksheet into a Word document that works OK such as when the Mathcad worksheet produces updated figures etc. But if you go into the Mathcad worksheet and alter it such as by adding or deleting lines from the worksheet above the location of the graph, then the link in the Word document is also shifted. It seems the linked copy of the Mathcad graph is based on absolute coordinates. So the linkage only works for an essentially static Mathcad worksheet.

Regards

David

MikeArmstrong · ‎Oct 05, 2010

(a) The text regions have only an adequate but not a top ability for a quality layout. Text regions cannot do left & right justified text. If it is a right-justified text region, it does not properly line up on the righthand boundary especially when printed and this is especially the case if the font is italic. Text regions at present allow the user to select any font etc which is fine. But presentation quality documents need to also allow for user-selected line spacing (eg 1.20, 1.80 etc line spacing) and also enable the user to adjust the space between characters in a word. Such fine adjustments enable a report to look more attractive to the eye and be more readable. Professional printers and typesetters understand these points. Given that Mathcad already includes some word-processing features within its text regions, I am only suggesting that the word-processing features be expanded to include the above. I really do not see this as a big deal.

I think you will be a little disappointed with Prime then, as I far as I'm aware the formatting capabilities are similar to that of the latest versions of Mathcad. I totally understand now why you want such features, but couldn't the reports be produced in Word and the Mathcad regions inserted where required?

(b) In a similar way, the page layout only does a part job and I suggest could be improved without too much effort by Mathcad. The vertical depth of the header & footer and the space available between them on the page is inflexible and needs to be more easily adjusted by the user. Finally, I suggested that the worksheet enable mixed portrait & landscape modes when printed.

There are options within Prime to reduce the vertical depth of the header. At the present time I don't think you can have mixed page layouts within a single worksheet, but if I remember correctly this is defiantly a feature PTC is going to implement. (Yes I do think this is an important feature and very much needed).

Finally, I have experimented and tried all sorts of ways of streamlining my use of Mathcad, Excel and Word. The obvious suggestion is to copy and paste/link results from Mathcad into the final report set up in a Word document. But this linking from Mathcad also has a problem. If you copy and paste / link say a graph in a Mathcad worksheet into a Word document that works OK such as when the Mathcad worksheet produces updated figures etc. But if you go into the Mathcad worksheet and alter it such as by adding or deleting lines from the worksheet above the location of the graph, then the link in the Word document is also shifted. It seems the linked copy of the Mathcad graph is based on absolute coordinates. So the linkage only works for an essentially static Mathcad worksheet.

I have a Mathcad template setup to match the margins of Word. Once I have completed my work in Mathcad I "Save As" an *.rtf file, which can then be opened in Word. All Maths regions are inserted as pictures.

The only problem with this is that the Mathcad regions will have to be re-saved if changed within Mathcad.

Mike

olivierlp · ‎Jan 03, 2022

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