Mathcad Prime 3.1

[MikeMcDermott]

Does anyone like Prime 3.1? Does it offer any benefit over MC14?

Thanks

[RichardJ]

It depends on what you want to do. It allows arrays with mixed units. You can interface to Creo with it. Other than those two things though, MC14 has more to offer.

[ddenholm]

I have been using the MC Prime since 1.0 and I was using earlier versions of MC since long before PTC bought it.

I don't use Creo and I don't use much of the higher end capabilities of MC (either Prime or <15) so I may not be representative of the larger user population.

I am generally writing simple systems of algebraic equations but I find MC's ability to keep track of the units of measure extremely useful and a great way to avoid unit errors. I find MC to be a great way to document calculations and methods... Something that Excel doesn't, ahem, excel at.

The Prime upgrade seems to have been, in many ways, rather cosmetic. The GUI now looks much more modern and the MC page now "looks" very much like a real laboratory notebook (blue grid line background and all). But even I noticed some MC 14/15 functionality that was missing from the early Prime version (e.g. the ability to define global definitions). Pretty much everything I missed from MC14 is now available in MC Prime 3.0 but I gather from other people's posts that some of the more advanced capabilities in MC 14 are still missing in Prime. I did download MC Prime 3.1 but found that the new features were all about CREO (whatever that is ).

I do get the impression that MC is the poor sister of PTC's product line and does not get a lot of development resources given the somewhat meager improvements in each new version.

[RichardJ]

Love it or hate it, it is inevitable that the future of Mathcad is Prime, so if it has everything you need then that's probably the best way to go. It is missing a lot of advanced features, but if you don't use them then that should be of little consequence. One thing you should think about is which version of Prime to use. PTC has decided that the the latest version should have no way to save a file to an earlier version. and no earlier version should be able to read a file from a later version. This philosophy extends even to minor version changes. So if you have version 3.1, and I have version 3.0, there is no way for you to create a file that I can read. Therefore if you create worksheets that others may need to open, you should not upgrade to a newer version unless it really offers something significant that you want or need. So, specifically, if you have Prime 3.0 do NOT upgrade to Prime 3.1 unless you either want to interface to Creo, or some other piece of software via the new automation interface. Doing so would gain you nothing, and would hinder you from working cooperatively with anyone that does not also have Prime 3.1.

FYI, Creo is PTCs CAD software.

[MikeMcDermott]

Here is my list of negatives for Prime 3.1:

Global variables are now global constants, so that results cannot be at the top of the document

Can’t assign image to variable for repeating image through the document for consistency and memory savings

8x longer to launch (~30 seconds). Much longer to open documents

Functions cannot be used as operators (can’t use R1 || R2 for example)

Plotting is much worse

Inability to protect regions from viewing or editing

Doesn’t automatically add page breaks very well. (Small image may straddle 2 pages)

Lack of Right Mouse button Context Menu (for cut/copy/paste)

Cannot name collapsed regions.

For some reason some of my programming block functions with 16 to 20 arguments are “too large to be calculated”. Other 20 argument functions don't have this issue.

No text styles

Opening/Closing collapsed sections painfully slow

No error tracing for programming blocks

Editing programming blocks painfully slow

Here is my list of positives:

Can have arrays with mixed units

Page view editing

[StuartBruff]

Mike McDermott wrote:

Here is my list of negatives for Prime 3.1:

Global variables are now global constants, so that results cannot be at the top of the document

Can’t assign image to variable for repeating image through the document for consistency and memory savings

Functions cannot be used as operators (can’t use R1 || R2 for example)

Plotting is much worse

Inability to protect regions from viewing or editing

Doesn’t automatically add page breaks very well. (Small image may straddle 2 pages)

Lack of Right Mouse button Context Menu (for cut/copy/paste)

Cannot name collapsed regions.

For some reason some of my programming block functions with 16 to 20 arguments are “too large to be calculated”. Other 20 argument functions don't have this issue.

No text styles

Opening/Closing collapsed sections painfully slow

No error tracing for programming blocks

Editing programming blocks painfully slow

I'm afraid this tends to confirm my view that the developers (to be precise, those deciding the requirements or making significant design decisions) aren't active users of Mathcad, except perhaps in a very restricted sense, and have a very programming-centric view of the Universe - the transformation of global variables to global constants is a dead give-away. They certainly don't appear to have much of an idea how Mathcad is generally used in the wild; indeed, the original concept of an engineer's / mathematician's / scientist's whiteboard seems to be slipping further and further away from the Prime's reality. I wonder how many of the shortcomings that people are commenting on are forced by the software paradigms of PTC's other applications?

Stuart

[Fred_Kohlhepp]

StuartBruff wrote:

I wonder how many of the shortcomings that people are commenting on are forced by the software paradigms of PTC's other applications?

Stuart

My company doesn't use Creo, The powers that be have chosen another 3D modeling software. But my observation has been that my co-workers who are strong 3D modelers do not require strong mathematical power--that job is the responsibility of others who do mathematical analysis but do not spend most of their time creating solid models of gears, etc or lofting surfaces. (There are some with their feet firmly in both camps.)

So I am not surprised to see Mathcad being reconfigured to exist as a "built-in calculator" for Creo. As for the mathematicians, they all learned Matab in college and prefer that anyway.

[StuartBruff]

Fred Kohlhepp wrote:

StuartBruff wrote:

I wonder how many of the shortcomings that people are commenting on are forced by the software paradigms of PTC's other applications?

Stuart

My company doesn't use Creo, The powers that be have chosen another 3D modeling software. But my observation has been that my co-workers who are strong 3D modelers do not require strong mathematical power--that job is the responsibility of others who do mathematical analysis but do not spend most of their time creating solid models of gears, etc or lofting surfaces. (There are some with their feet firmly in both camps.)

So I am not surprised to see Mathcad being reconfigured to exist as a "built-in calculator" for Creo. As for the mathematicians, they all learned Matab in college and prefer that anyway.

I don't have a problem with Mathcad being modified for better integration with other PTC products; it makes commercial and user/system sense. What I do have a problem with is the apparent failure to recognize that the application has a much wider potential audience as a stand-alone product, and, as noted above, their inability to keep the overall spirit (and capabilities) of Mathcad going in the product line.

I also note the apparent failure of their development strategy to push their expertise with other products back into Mathcad. For example, they have not taken their document production capability and put it into Mathcad to improve Mathcad's ability to handle and display text in all its forms, and to provide facilities such as automatic object numbering, indexing and tables of content.

As for mathematicians ... well, Matlab is like their Excel at the moment. It is very good, but it's still stuck in the software development paradigm and doesn't really lend itself to the overall documentation and implementation paradigm of Mathcad. Preference, like many things, is often based on previous exposure and the fact that after a while, people have learned to think inside a given application's way of working and are reluctant to invest the mental resources in learning a new tool. Excel is the classic example of this .. it's (IMO) a very good application and I can do a great deal in it; however, it is also used for things it should never have been considered for except as an act of despair - eg, relational database applications and anything involving more than a few inter-related cell calculations (it can be a nightmare trying to verify such worksheets or deal with the oddities that arise with user-defined functions).

What I have found is that those who have used Mathcad tend to be fiercely supportive of it and have to be pushed hard to use anything else. Why would you want to go back to coding in text and typing up results in a Word document when you can just drop an integral onto the worksheet, write expressions using Greek characters, evaluate it, write the results to a file/Excel, graph it, type in your supporting notes and have somebody review it as a single document in a format that looks like a textbook? It makes life a lot easier and (at least in M15) you can even call Matlab / Simulink functions/blocks if you want to from the corresponding Mathcad component.

Stuart

[RichardJ]

recognize that the application has a much wider potential audience as a stand-alone product

PTC is making sure that will no longer be true. Unfortunately, they are doing so mainly by driving away the existing user base, rather than by inducing hordes of CAD users to drive their designs from mathematical software.

[athurin]

Richard Jackson wrote:

PTC is making sure that will no longer be true. Unfortunately, they are doing so mainly by driving away the existing user base, rather than by inducing hordes of CAD users to drive their designs from mathematical software.

The issue is that CAD people and people who do heavy math are (IMO) not the same people, in many cases. Therefore, I don't really see the value of integrating Mathcad with Creo. Except for big teams where you want to link documents done by different people, but I'd be surprised if that was a big enough market to address...

[StuartBruff]

Adrien Thurin wrote:

Richard Jackson wrote:

PTC is making sure that will no longer be true. Unfortunately, they are doing so mainly by driving away the existing user base, rather than by inducing hordes of CAD users to drive their designs from mathematical software.

The issue is that CAD people and people who do heavy math are (IMO) not the same people, in many cases. Therefore, I don't really see the value of integrating Mathcad with Creo. Except for big teams where you want to link documents done by different people, but I'd be surprised if that was a big enough market to address...

Oh, I can see the benefits of integrating Creo and Mathcad. I think you're probably right about the CAD people, but the ability to exchange data and to be able to explore ideas in 3D based on Mathcad-generated data could be valuable to systems engineers. In that respect, the functions that I've seen posted on this forum don't seem to go far enough, in that they're mainly 2D! I would have thought that a proper multidimensional array (MDA) would have been high on the list of features that a CAD model would benefit from; the current system, whilst semi-usable, is poorly supported (eg, clumsy nested array indexing and absence of worksheet-level nested indexing on the lhs of an assignment, lack of high-level operations for operating on and concatenating subdimensional elements).

Stuart

[RichardJ]

I agree with you that there is a benefit to integrating math software with CAD software, but I think only for a minority of CAD users. CAD is used to design just about everything (heck, I even use it), and only a small subset of products would benefit from being able to drive the CAD from the math software.

[athurin]

Exactly my point. No doubt that *some* people benefit from it. But is there enough of those people to justify to focus 100% of PTC's engineering efforts towards them, while pushing away the other users ? I would be surprised if that was a viable business model...

[dschenken]

There are already a half-dozen ways to drive Creo from an external source, so adding Mathcad is a drop in an already diluted pool of choices.

[Raiko]

...is the apparent failure to recognize that the application has a much wider potential audience as a stand-alone product...

I whole heartedly agree Stuart.

It seems as if PTC's management doesn't have a coherent view about which course to pursue. So they checked where all the others were heading and adopted a ribbon GUI, pushed hard to integrate software they like into their main product Creo (formerly known as ProE) and make it web-based so that they can exploit "the cloud". None of this did help me in any way to get my work done. We're using three different PTC products over here and it is obvious that PTC has a myopic view when it comes what the software is used or needed for.

Maybe I'm too cynical and one should never suspect malice when plain stubborness suffices, but I can not help thinking that the lack of "stand-alone" features in MC Prime (good plotting, decent text formatting etc.) is neither an oversight nor a bug. It may be well that they do not want it to achieve more in order to further a monolithic system to which they can sell components that do not run on their own.

This "we're making of a one-size-fits-all software" reminds me of 3D movies. Only a few visionary directors do have an idea how to use 3D to promote the narrative. The rest merely follows the majority as 3D is all the rage (see ribbon GUI).

Lack of vision and PTC's immunity to feedback doesn't allow for more than tagging along with the crowd.

Raiko