Mathcad Tips

Mathcad Prime 11 world premiere sneak peek + roadmap REPLAY ON-DEMAND!

August 20, 2024 Webcast

On April 9, 2024, 11:30 Eastern Time, PTC presented "The Latest in PTC Mathcad Prime 10". During the 28-minute webinar, PTC Mathcad product manager Andy McGough shows the new enhancements coming to Mathcad Prime 10, including Advanced Controls with scripting & choice of solving algorithms. There were also some brief bullet points at what's to come for future Mathcad Prime releases. Mathcad Prime 10 will be available for release and download later by April 23, 2024. Watch the webinar on-demand here!

It's a new, 2024 version of our "Happy Easter!" Easter Egg! What's different from the previous years' eggs is that this one is in Mathcad Prime 9, which allows us to use the "More Colors..." custom colour picker, for a far wider range of designs than before. The attached worksheet predominantly uses PTC's colour palette, which requires use of the custom colour picker... but there are some extra fun (non-PTC), previously unusable colours too, like pure green (0,255,0) and pink.   Happy Easter 2024!

Register for the Mathcad Virtual Conference 2023!

Professor Tetsuro Tokoro (ttokoro on the PTC Community) is a member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan (IEEJ), and he has dedicated much of his time to teaching and studying electric circuit design for his college students at Japan’s National Institute of Technology (KOSEN), Gifu College.   A true man of math, ttokoro finds helping community members solve their problems to be very fun. He seeks out math-based brain teasers and shares them with the Mathcad community to gain the insights of his kind and very intelligent fellow Mathcad users. These include resistor meshes (including in 3D), perfect squared squares, and a puzzle where you must identify the minimum radius on a circle with n number of points where all distances between points must be an integer. Sometimes, he looks for problems on rosettacode.org to solve.   According to ttokoro, many of these problems are unique and won’t be found in a textbook (and many math textbooks in use were written before math software came to the scene) but demonstrate the value of math software. Ttokoro ventures to say that a lot of these problems cannot be solved by hand, or at least it would be unviable to do so, especially for students. Instead, Mathcad and its programming operators must be used to solve these problems.   Montage of resistor meshes and other fun problems ttokoro has introduced   Beginning in 2021, ttokoro has also become a prolific uploader of Japanese PTC Mathcad content on YouTube. Many of these videos share tips or are tie-ins to the puzzles he or others post on the PTC Community, including the Mathcad Community Challenges.   Ttokoro’s best resistor 3D mesh electric circuit. (Each edge is made by one ohm. Find the resistance between Node [0,0,0] and [1,1,2].)   Ttokoro first started using Mathcad with Mathcad 12, and his biggest requests for Mathcad Prime features are transparent colour availability and for the Animation tool to return. You’ll notice that in his brain teasers, as well as in his submissions to the Mathcad Community Challenges, ttokoro likes to show results with plots because it helps convey the meaning better than with math results alone and having more tools to show the results via images helps with that. This sort of thinking carries over to his academic work as well.   Ttokoro wearing his PTC Champion Jacket and PTC Mathcad T- shirt!   Thank you for your enthusiasm for math and contributions to the PTC Community, ttokoro!

Registration has opened for the Mathcad Virtual Conference 2022! Happening September 13, 2022, 10:00 Eastern time.   This will be our third annual Mathcad conference, and this year we're promising to talk only about information with demos that you will find valuable and interesting. You'll hear from... Brian Thompson, Mathcad general manager, introducing the show and discussing the current state of Mathcad Andrew McGough, Mathcad product manager, presenting an updated Mathcad Prime roadmap, along with world-premiere demos of some of the new functionality coming to next year's Mathcad Prime 9 Anji Seberino, Mathcad application engineer, showcasing Mathcad Prime's powerful design of experiments functionality Anna Novikova, Mathcad software engineer, deeply detailing the improvements made to Mathcad Prime 8's numeric and symbolic engines (including some enhancements that were not documented in Mathcad Help) A Mathcad customer and how Mathcad Prime powers his innovative structural engineering start-up Throughout the conference, you'll get to share your feedback to PTC about the sessions. We'll also be manning a text-based Q&A box. And if you are within the first 500 registrants, you will be able to have your chance to win a raffle to win one of 25 brand-new 100% cotton Mathcad T-shirts. PTC hasn't had new Mathcad merchandise in about a decade, but now we do, and these shirts are quite wonderful. The raffle numbers will be drawn using a Mathcad Prime program during the conference.   We hope to see you there! And if you aren't able to make it on the day of, we are recording the sessions and will send you the recordings afterward. We really hope that you'll find this to be the best Mathcad conference that we've ever hosted.       (view in My Videos)  

  (Made in PTC Mathcad Prime 7)

A Mathcad user for 25 years, Professor Valery (‘Val’) Ochkov takes to the mountains when not involved in developing training and educational software for fossil and nuclear power plants.  He’s shown below in the Chimbulak region of Kazakstahn.   Val has long been involved in the Mathcad community! See the photo of the “Mathcad Clock.”       This is from a post back in 2010!  Beyond answering questions, Valery is also known for using math equations to create designs and authoring Mathcad trivia challenges for other community members to participate in. Some of the more entertaining challenges might be the Hare and Snell’s law and the Problem of Cockroach Races.  The Bicycle Post where Valery quizzes the community on how to solve “How many strokes with a bicycle pump need to be done to inflate the tire to 5atm” also inspired engagement. When asked for hobbies that don’t involve hiking boots, Val assured us his hobbies really are writing books and articles about Mathcad.   He’s now deeply interested in using Mathcad for STEM education, the subject of his latest book, 2⁵ Problems for STEM Education 2 (2020). He says collaborations with community members were critical to developing the material.  Way to go Mathcad Community!  Keep Collaborating! Keep engaging and great things like a book is born!            

https://www.engineering.com/story/my-top-3-engineering-nightmares-expert-shares-the-truth-on-software-selection   Anji Seberino, the head of our PTC Mathcad Application Engineer team, recently took some time to interview with engineering.com about her top 3 engineering nightmares accumulated from her own experience as an engineer. From missing units to debugging custom code to trying to reverse engineer IP stored in crazy, inherited spreadsheets, you too have probably faced these issues in your time in the industry when not everyone is using the right software and processes.   Let us know what you think of the interview!

I'm sharing a recent long-form interview that PTC's CAD/engineering calculations general manager, Brian Thompson, had with engineering.com: https://www.engineering.com/story/video/for-power-mathematics-retire-the-spreadsheet Alongside with the video interview, there is also a written transcript. You don't have to share any of your own information to access it.   For Power Mathematics, Retire the Spreadsheet   Brian talked through a wide variety of topics, including why engineers and research scientists across many various industries choose PTC Mathcad and how those customers use it, the old and painful days of trying to perform complex calculations in spreadsheets, and some glimpses into the future of Mathcad.

Hi Mathcad community members,   For those of you who don't know me (some do), my name is Andrew McGough and I'm the product manager for Mathcad here at PTC. I have talked to some of you in the past individually, but I don't get to participate as much as I'd like on the community. I hope this announcement is the start of me being able to be more active here.   I would like to share with you that PTC is announcing the end-of-sale for the following versions of PTC Mathcad, effective December 31, 2021:   Mathcad 15  Mathcad Prime 1.0 – Prime 6.0     Effective January 1, 2022, the only version of PTC Mathcad available for subscription will be PTC Mathcad Prime 7 and future versions of PTC Mathcad Prime. After December 31, 2021, PTC will no longer have the right to sell or distribute software versions moving to end of sale due to a third-party component contained in those versions.    I appreciate the passion of our Mathcad userbase, so I would like to pass along some additional information on a helpful offer. If you currently have a subscription license and wish to continue using your current version of PTC Mathcad while you evaluate Mathcad Prime 7, we are offering a multi-year renewal option that will give you the ability to use your current version for up to four additional years. If you decide to take advantage of this offer, it is important to place the order prior to December 7, 2021 to ensure no issues in booking the order or the subscription start date. PTC may decline or be unable to process orders received after that date. Please contact your PTC account representative or PTC partner for more information.    Please bear in mind that the use of old versions of software does introduce implicit risk in areas of security, hardware, and software platform support.    PTC will continue to provide technical support access, phone assistance and expert input for versions of Mathcad that have reached end-of-sale. PTC will not be able to issue new licenses or provide access to software downloads for end-of-sale versions.    Our customers in English-speaking countries received the End-of-Sale announcement on February 17, 2021. Our global customers are receiving the localized communication now.    We have put together multiple resources for you to answer your questions. Please refer to our FAQ for more information. We know this is a big change so the Mathcad team will be monitoring this thread for feedback.   Best regards,  Andrew McGough,  Product Manager, PTC 

Are you making the most of your engineering calculation software? REGISTER NOW for a free webcast that explores solving and optimization. Presented by Anji Seberino, PTC’s leading Mathcad expert, the online event takes place Thursday, June 18 at 10 am PDT and 1 pm EDT.   Anji will focus the session on solving linear and nonlinear systems. Plus, you’ll learn how to set up and solve optimization problems.   This webcast is part of the weekly education series for engineers who want to learn more about PTC Mathcad as a powerful alternative for engineering calculations. Visit the registration page to view weekly topics and sign up today to join in.   REGISTER NOW!  

Hi All – I want to announce a critical bug fix release of PTC Mathcad Prime 4.0. We recently discovered an issue where some password protected areas can become corrupted on save/open. This is an issue we feel important enough to fix in a maintenance release. We’ve investigated the issue, submitted and tested a fix and will be releasing PTC Mathcad Prime 4.0 M010 later today. Anyone using Prime 4.0 F000 should upgrade to Prime 4.0 M010 – we’ll be removing Prime 4.0 F000 from download to make sure only the fixed version is available.   We do our best to avoid situations like this but sometimes bugs happen and when they do, we assess them to understand the impact on users. If they’re critical issues, such as this one, we do our best to fix them as soon as possible.   Many thanks,   Andy.

This video gives a quick demo on how to configure Mathcad Prime with locked / Standalone license after receiving the license file via e-mail.  

This video gives a quick demo on how to convert legacy Mathcad files (.mcd, .xmcd) to Mathcad Prime format (.mcdx)

This is the worksheet corresponding to the blog post Curve Fitting Made Easy.

Creo Parametric 2.0 integration with Mathcad Prime 3.0.     (view in My Videos)

Full list of worksheets   WriteSTL allows Mathcad users to create 3D models mathematically using PTC Mathcad then save them as STL files, perfectly suited for incorporation to CAD assemblies.   Along with the README, the WriteSTL.zip file contains two worksheets, showing 2 different matrix styles possible to generate 3D models. WriteSTL takes an array of triangle vertices. The included PTC Mathcad worksheets demonstrate inline routines to convert each matrix type to triangle vertices arrays.   Also included is the WriteSTL Custom Function compiled and linked for the Windows 7 64-bit platform. The MS Visual Studio project with source is included for anyone needing to build for different Windows Platforms. Microsoft has a free, Express version of Microsoft Visual Studio customers are using to successfully build PTC Mathcad Custom Functions.