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MikeMcDermott1-Visitor
1-Visitor
March 23, 2015
Question

Mathcad Prime 3.1

  • March 23, 2015
  • 3 replies
  • 5798 views

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

Thanks

3 replies

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RichardJ19-Tanzanite
19-Tanzanite
March 23, 2015

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.

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ddenholm1-Visitor
1-Visitor
March 23, 2015

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.

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RichardJ19-Tanzanite
19-Tanzanite
March 25, 2015

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.

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MikeMcDermott1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
March 25, 2015

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

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StuartBruff23-Emerald V
23-Emerald V
March 25, 2015

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

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Fred_Kohlhepp23-Emerald I
23-Emerald I
March 25, 2015

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.

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