1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders.
I am a company director and principal electrical engineer in the railway sector. I provide engineering consulting services to railway operators.
2. What version of Mathcad are you currently running?
I am using Mathcad Prime 7.0
3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video.
I am importing data from Excel tables to document electrical system protection calculations. Mathcad is better at documenting matrix calculations (e.g. nodal / mesh analysis for electric circuits) for electrical fault levels than Excel, however, Excel with Power Query provides a better data entry experience for users.
4. What is the use case for your organization?
The READEXCEL function requires a text variable to define the range in the form Sheet![R1C1]:[R2C2], however much of my data is in Excel ListObjects which have a named range (e.g. "NodesTable" = Sheet1!A10:B45). I tried using the READEXCEL function with a named range but it seems to only accept a static cell address definition. I request that the function parameters of the READEXCEL/WRITEEXCEL functions be modified to allow an Excel NamedRange to be specified in addition to the hard coded cell address.
In this way, for example, I could write in Mathcad, Nodes:=READEXCEL(SourceFile, "NodesTable") which would extract the data from the named range "NodesTable" instead of Nodes:=READEXCEL(SourceFile, "Sheet1!A10:F45"). This means that I would not be required to updating the cell references whennever the source data changes.
5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization?
It is of somewhat negligible business value but it is something which would make me choose to write Excel macros or choose a different product than Mathcad to solve the problem.
