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prop_design15-Moonstone
15-Moonstone
October 2, 2019
Question

Mathcad Prime 6.0 is out!

  • October 2, 2019
  • 9 replies
  • 17195 views

I see that Prime 6.0 has been released today. On the e-store I see either a full license or a student license. Maple offers a home use license, but it doesn't seem like Mathcad has that. Does anyone know for sure? Also, does Mathcad 15 come with Prime 6.0 purchase. The e-store doesn't say.

 

Based on all the forum posts, it looks like Prime 6 delivers a lot more than people expected. It seems to address a lot of the gripes. I'm curious what the new symbolic engine is. Is it home grown or licensed from someone. The Knitro solver is mentioned, but I think that's something different.

 

Thanks,

 

Anthony

9 replies

T
21-Topaz II
terryhendicott21-Topaz II
21-Topaz II
October 2, 2019

Hi

From the store notes two home licences are available from one subscription

 

"To maximize your software investment, every PTC Mathcad Prime 6.0 license comes with one year of PTC Global Support, including two FREE additional PTC Mathcad license for home use (subscription only), allowing you to enjoy the freedom to work outside the office when needed."

 

Cheers

Terry

S
StuartBruff23-Emerald V
23-Emerald V
November 7, 2019

Does anybody know if there are any upgrade offers in the offing for upgrading to Prime 6?  I've been out of the loop for a while (illness) and would like to get back up to speed, but, now being retired, not at full licence price if I can avoid it.

 

Is Mathcad 15 (whatever) still included in the licence?

L
LucMeekes23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
November 7, 2019

Welcome back Stuart,

 

You may know that you can install Prime 6 and use it for 30 days in full. After that it drops down to Prime 6 Express. That means you can open any Prime (1, 2, 3, 3.1, 4, 5 and 6) sheet and see any stored results, but 'Premium features' are disabled (which means that upon recalculation you may run into 'premium' messages). Premium features are such things as programming, symbolics, referenced sheets, and of course lots of functions such as bessel functions,  many graphics import and export functions and of course mean(), stdev() etc.

If you hadn't installed Mathcad 15 on your (new) PC you may be able to freely enjoy Mathcad 15 for a couple of weeks as well.

 

Luc

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Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
October 2, 2019
Based on all the forum posts, it looks like Prime 6 delivers a lot more than people expected. It seems to address a lot of the gripes. I'm curious what the new symbolic engine is. Is it home grown or licensed from someone. The Knitro solver is mentioned, but I think that's something different.

Not sure what exactly you mean by "address a lot of the gripes". It was already told in another thread that we can expect a spell checker and custom margins in P6 - the interesting thing is that PTC seems to find it even worthwhile to mention those "features".  Both feature should be standard anyway and do not address the main points of criticism of Prime.

The highly praised numeric Knitro solvers from Artelys were implemented in Prime from the very beginning AFAIR. In actual work they  proved not much advantage over the formerly used implemented algorithms. In some cases (there are some forum threads about it) they performs even worse. While in old Mathcad you could chose among a couple of different algorithms and could change some parameters there, there is no such option in Prime - if it doesn't come to a solution there is no way you can tune it.

The real surprise about P6 is that there is a new symbolic engine. Haven't heard that PTC would work on that project. Its also unclear if its a PTC development or a third party software. Obviously PTC does not like to pay license fees to MathWorks for that age-old version of MuPad in the long run (MuPad in MatLab is much newer and more powerful and flexible). PTC seems to see it as a work in progress as the website states that the results may look different to what you are used to and that for the next few versions of Prime (= next few years ?) you have the option to switch back to Mupad for the symbolic calculations. Does not sound promising but we have to give it a test run someday to see whats it worth.

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Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
October 3, 2019
Does not sound promising but we have to give it a test run someday to see whats it worth.

Couldn't wait 😉 So here's the result of my first test of the new symbolic engine.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/Mathcad-Prime-6-0-Symbolic-Engine-based-on-Axiom-Fricas/m-p/629436/highlight/true#M187308

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Nicholas1-Visitor
1-Visitor
May 10, 2020

On the contrary, it sounds very promising.

D
DJF16-Pearl
16-Pearl
October 2, 2019

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/mathcad/new-release 

 

  • Customization of margin dimensions, including headers and footers
  • Spellcheck available option and supports multiple languages
  • Add hyperlinks directly in worksheets
  • Expanded list of print options, and find/replace subscripts or individual parts of identifiers
  • 2D chart application options such as exporting plot as an image file
  • New symbolic calculation engine  

I guess a new symbolic engine is exciting.  Hope it's an improvement.  The rest.... what is this, 1995?

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Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
October 2, 2019
I guess a new symbolic engine is exciting.

Fully agreed on.

A new version of Mathcad with a modern new code base would be as exciting (and necessary), but PTC was not able or willing to provide a decent piece of software with comparable capability in more than 10 years.

Nonetheless - they made me curious and so I guess I will testdrive it next weekend.

 

Hope it's an improvement. 

Really!? OK, its said that hope dies last. I read that we will be able to switch back to the old symbolic engine (MuPad) for the next few versions of Prime. So it looks like PTC sees the new symbolic as a work in progress and thats not exactly trustworthy.
Does anybody know if the new symbolic is a third party software and who developed it? Given the mediocre 2D plot component which they obviously were not able to develop themselves I hardly can image they would be able to create a symbolic engine.

 

The rest.... what is this, 1995?

Well said. Look at it as a couple of bug fixes.

 

F
Fred_Kohlhepp23-Emerald I
23-Emerald I
October 2, 2019

You've all missed (or I haven't seen) the big news:  2D plotting is now as good as Mathcad 15 was!  (Or is that still the add-in?

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LucMeekes23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
October 3, 2019

Typical PTC:

 

On the download page for Prime 6 is a link to

" PTC Mathcad Prime 6.0 Platform Support and System Requirements document (PDF)"

Which gives you the requirements for Prime 5.0.0.0

F
Fred_Kohlhepp23-Emerald I
23-Emerald I
October 3, 2019

Interesting!  When I downloaded it I got Prime 4,0

L
LucMeekes23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
October 3, 2019

Prime 6 (as well as Prime 5) only install on 64-bit Windows.

Is your windows 64-bit, or 32 ?

 

Luc

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LucMeekes23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
October 3, 2019

Here's another one. It says: "Click Finish to exit the PTC Installation Assistant."

LM_20191003_Prime6.png

Clicking the dark green "Finish" field to the left does nothing.

I wonder if I should click the "Exit >" button at the lower right...

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prop_design15-MoonstoneAuthor
15-Moonstone
October 3, 2019

i tried twice to download prime 6 but never got the link. i tried emailing them and having heard anything. thanks for the tip about asking them for a retiree type license. if i ever hear anything back i will.

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LucMeekes23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
October 3, 2019

It should be that if you register here:

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/mathcad-express-free-download

you get an email from PTC with a download link....

P
prop_design15-MoonstoneAuthor
15-Moonstone
October 3, 2019

yeah, that worked for me in the past. but it's not working for me now. i tried twice and finally emailed them. but crickets...

J
JeffH116-Pearl
16-Pearl
October 4, 2019

I'm in the process of downloading and installing, but one big hitter for me is the addition of embedding hyperlinks.  This might actually make eBooks possible again in Prime.

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Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
October 4, 2019
@JeffH1 wrote:

I'm in the process of downloading and installing, but one big hitter for me is the addition of embedding hyperlinks.  This might actually make eBooks possible again in Prime.

Haven't tried yet, but from what I've read you can link to websites, locally stored files or (not sure) call external programs.

But to make eBooks possible again we would need a mechanism to link to a specific place in a specific Prime file.

J
JeffH116-Pearl
16-Pearl
October 4, 2019

Most eBooks ( Hicks' ME, Roark's Formulas, Hicks' EEE, and including my own) use a Table of Contents (TOC) page that contains links out to individual topics in separate documents and the requisite links back to the TOC in each of those.  While jumping within a document was useful in Mathcad 15, not many of the add-on eBooks used this feature and I haven't used it in my own.  Keeping topic files small is a far better mechanism.

 

Now, an eBook viewer like Mathcad 15 has would be wonderful (it "jumps" to different documents in stead of opening new document tabs and leaving them all open), but this is certainly a start and will save having to convert TOC pages to HTML, which was the only recourse in the past.  It's a start.

P
prop_design15-MoonstoneAuthor
15-Moonstone
October 4, 2019

i guess the third time is the charm, like they say. finally got the link when i tried again today. two other days i tried nothing happened.

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prop_design15-MoonstoneAuthor
15-Moonstone
October 4, 2019

i finally got the link and it installs fine. the what's new document says they did make some improvements to the plotting. i'm curious to know what people think of this release. there were a lot of complaints for many years. does prime 6 address enough of them? i don't use it enough personally to have an opinion. i like classic mathcad much better.

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Patrick91-Visitor
1-Visitor
October 16, 2019

PTC Mathcad Prime is the industry standard for engineering calculation software, helping you solve your most complex problems and share your engineering calculations with colleagues UPSers Login. Now we’ve just made it even easier with PTC Mathcad Prime 6.0.

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Fred_Kohlhepp23-Emerald I
23-Emerald I
October 16, 2019

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

 

ROFLMAO

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