Report writing and Exporting Mathcad Prime Equations and Text to MS Word

[MarkBuckton]

I have been writing a technical report in MS Word 2013 and wanted to incorporate some Mathcad equations and supporting text to word I.e export Prime to word. Not as an object because this is problematic when then Mathcad worksheet is more than one A4 page long (word doesn't like object to span more than one page) I.e you have to shrink the object to fit on one page in word and then it becomes unreadable. To my surprise this simple exercise is impossible with Prime (at least I. Think it is). Someone told me that Word is really good at reading HTML but again I don't find that an output of that format in Prime either. Then I remembered Mathcad 15 could save as HTML so with much effort I reconstructed the Prime worksheet in MC 15. I then did a HTML export which I was happy about but then I find that MC 15 must be using an older version of HTML which MS Word 2013 rejects. So what seemed at first to be at first to be a trivial exercise has taken me many hours and ultimately failed. I cannot see a work around way of doing this. I have tried RTF from MC 15 but that is very problematic because Word renders normal text in Mathcad as if it were an equation i.e. it encloses everything in stupid boxes which are a real PITA to edit in Word. I don't know what other users think but I find this situation very annoying and unacceptable? Prime has no ability to export to MS Word or HTML and MC 15 fails or at best does the most ameturist translation job imaginable. Well what does one expect from a $2,600 AUD software? Obviously the guys in PTC have never had to write a technical report because if they had I am sure they would be giving us at least some software interoperability. Please don't say convert MC to a PDF and then convert the PDF back to Word as that in my view is a very lame solution after all Word also has an equation editor so why can't there be a good translation from Prime to Word? However maybe there is a better way that some have stumble upon if so could you please let me know?

regard, Mark

[Werner_E · Accepted solution]

I have been writing a technical report in MS Word 2013 and wanted to incorporate some Mathcad equations and supporting text to word I.e export Prime to word. Not as an object because this is problematic when then Mathcad worksheet is more than one A4 page long

Huh? "some Mathcad equations": works OK with copy and paste in MC15, Prime's copy and paste is ... (fill in the blanks)

But your second sentence looks like you want to insert a whole huge worksheet in a word document and I wonder why.

BTW, unfortunately you cannot create publication quality plot in neither version of Mathcad. You will either have to rework the plots in another program or export the data and cretae the plot in a specialized program like Origin.

Someone told me that Word is really good at reading HTML but again I don't find that an output of that format in Prime either. Then I remembered Mathcad 15 could save as HTML so with much effort I reconstructed the Prime worksheet in MC 15. I then did a HTML export which I was happy about but then I find that MC 15 must be using an older version of HTML which MS Word 2013 rejects.

Don't have access to Office 2013 at the time but I can't image that it will refuse older HTML versions. What problem exactly do you experience here? In MC15 you must chose "Save as Web Page .." for the HTML export. If you use "Save as ..." and then chose html, the pics and math areas won't be exported as pictures.

I have tried RTF from MC 15 but that is very problematic because Word renders normal text in Mathcad as if it were an equation i.e. it encloses everything in stupid boxes which are a real PITA to edit in Word.

Hm, boxes? Sure the text will be arranged in text boxes to be able to preserve the original layout as good as possible - you won't see them in print anyway. You will get a similar result if you use a pdf2word converter. You can hardly expect a continuous, running text when the source is splitted into smaller chunks of text regions.

The solution to the whole problem is not to implement a better "Word export" in Mathcad but to implement better wordprocessing features in Mathcad so it can produce decent reports on its own. But unfortunately at the time we don't experience program advancements but rather kind of retrogression.

[epeetam]

Hi there,

I fully agree with Mark Buckton.  It's annoying in Prime (3.1) to not have the possibility to write out your calculations in a file format Word understands.  I don't know in what kind of ivory tower these PTC developers live in.

Generally I make reports implementing figures and text for the report of Finite Element calculations.  Word is a worldwide standard for making reports.  Most engineers work with it since it has a lot of capabilities including API programming etc. I only use mathcad to make some detail calculations and 'wish' to implement this in Word.  This is a hell!

We can't wait till PTC develops a fully text editor which can compete with MS Word.  We are waiting for decades now to have a solution and we are stuck with Mathcad 15. This issue prevents us to transfer to Prime.

So PTC should listen to their customers and be wise to integrate a way of writing out decent file types which can be used in other programs like Word.  Writing out Prime files in the XPS format and transforming it into a Word input file (e.g. by www.pdfaid.com) makes a mess out of the Prime file.

When can we expact a solution in this?