Thanks Fred! Yes what you says does work 
! I was able to display both units on the same worksheet. I can now justify upgrading to the latest version.
Fred Kohlhepp wrote:
Philip Oakley wrote:
The units of Torque aren't simply Newton.metres, rather it is Newton.metres per radian. That is, you need to multiply Torque by Angle turned to compute the work (Energy - joules) expended.
<snip>
At that point torque and bending moment both are correctly force times shortest distance. No?
Correct; It's 'No'.
The reason/problem that the two are different is that the Newton is force, which is mass * acceleration, and acceleration is length per time^2, so overall we have the confusion between Length * Lenght, and Length * Length, without any way to discriminate between the Length axes in use.
If we had Lx, Ly and Lz as independent (unit) dimensions, which clearly they are as geometry dimensions, then it would all be obvious (Proposed by Williams in ~1896 or thereby!). So we could see N_x.m_y as being Torque, while N_x.m_x as Energy. But William's ideas never got anywhere....
[Aside: the (1/2)m.v^2 kinetic energy is the same as E=mc^2 with relativity applied to the root(1-(v/c)^2) relativity term (with first order approximation), i.e. energy is the square of Length, not an area L_x.L_y ...]
The alternative to William's Lx;Ly;Lz is to monitor how often we cancel out independant terms, i.e Lx/Ly, which is "Angle", though it is used as an (in)correctness monitor. That's why we do dimensional analysis - to detect mistakes.
Historically all calculations were by hand, so could be done separately, but now with computers we no longer do those checks, especially if we code algorithms. But at least MathCAD will detect most unit/dimensions errors (not like MatLab....8-).
BUT PTC FAILS TO DISTINGUISH Nm from mN (apparently somewhere in Pro/e you had to use that convention for the difference).
PS You can define a variable called "Torque(Nm)" (using chemical notation) which can be put in the units place holder where required. You can even 'cheat and define Torque(Nm) := Joule instead of Torque(Nm) := metre.Newton <wink> 
. This will at least give the reader a proper understanding of the calculation result.
