Prime Problems: Document Interaction

Document interaction in Prime is so awkward and time-consuming that it makes users mutter, "This is garbage," (or words to that effect) and swear never to to use Prime again. That can't be good for marketing or sales.

These simple actions - moving around in a document, cutting/copying and pasting regions from one place to another, expanding and collapsing areas, editing equations and programs, and so on - are performed constantly when developing a worksheet. Making them easy to do should be a design priority. Yet, in that area, Prime is perhaps the worst of all significant Windows programs.

It's serious. Although lack of some advanced features may disappoint users, document interaction problems actually repel them. Fixing those problems should be a priority, if only to keep PTC's user base.

Some are listed below in the hope that they will be fixed. Anyone care to add to the list?

* Prime is slow and unresponsive. The delayed imaging of characters when typing in a text box is merely irritating. However, the multisecond delays after each keystroke when editing a long program make Prime useless, since you don't know what it is doing or whether it is even responding. Even programs that are half a page long suffer half-second delays after every single keystroke. This is not acceptable in what PTC calls "the industry standard." Similarly, 5-second delays in expanding/collapsing areas. The big worry: it feels like a fundamental problem with the code, not a quick fix, one that will persist for version after version. If it's still in Prime 4, then we can assume that it will never be fixed and that Prime will never be a useable package.

* Page up/down to move through documents is useless. The cursor travels with the up/down action and, when it lands in a text region (as it will, sooner or later), the PgUp PgDn keys don't work anymore. You then have to click near the margin to reposition the cursor, and try page up/down until it gets stuck yet again.

* For moving around in documents, PTC, please don't suggest use of the scroll bar, instead. On long documents the scroll bar doesn't give enough resolution to put you in the place you want. You just get close, at which point you try the page up/down keys, with their own frustrations just noted.

* Moving regions is time-consuming. Like Mathcad, Prime lets you select one or more regions by running the mouse across them with the button held down, so you can cut or copy them as a group. Unlike Mathcad, you cannot then move them by clicking anywhere in regions and dragging. Instead, you have to position the cursor carefully on the edge of a region and drag, or use the arrow keys. It doesn't sound like much, but it costs time, and users need to develop worksheets quickly. It's unfortunate, because we went through this with Mathcad, too, when versions 10 to 12 (?) required careful positioning of the cursor on the edge of a region.

* No space made for pasted regions. In editing, we might have put one or more regions on the clipboard. We then click to put the cursor where we want to paste them. Prime doesn't move nearby regions to make space for them, and the pasted regions overlap with nearby ones. To be fair, this is true of Mathcad, too, but it would be a welcome fix.

* No Paste Special. When writing a report, we might create calculations resulting in a plot. In the discussion that follows, we want to display a set of plots, each for a different set of parameters. In Mathcad, we simply select each instance of the plot by running the mouse over it (dotted lines), then Paste Special> Windows Metafile to put a non-computable image in the discussion section. Not possible in Prime, though. Paste puts a computable plot on the page, and it transforms as usual with parameter changes. The only workaround is cumbersome: Paste Special in some other application, like Word, where it appears as a bitmap, then copy that image to the clipboard for pasting back into Prime. Really slow, and the final image quality is poor.