Sub-areas would help organize worksheets

[ptc-4163714]

As a circuit designer, nearly every worksheet I create has an initial section with lots of component definitions. Some of the component definitions are fairly lengthy and include discussion. Depending on the design there could be upwards of 50 components to define, and that's before anything remotely useful is done with the worksheet. I usually organize worksheets into areas such that there's a component section, an error analysis section, a spec section, and random other sections as they become necessary. I would love to have the ability to further segment each section/area into subsections, but alas... subsections/sub-areas are not supported (as far as I can tell) in MathCAD in any version.

As a result, I have component sections that are 20 pages long. And every time I want to tweak a component parameter, I have to dig through 20 pages of components to find the one resistor I'm interested in so I can change it's tolerance. It would be much more usable as an organizational/documentation tool if there were more tools to organize and document the math. Sub-areas, on the surface, seems like an easy to implement means of giving us better organizational tools for our worksheets. In the case of my specific components problem, I would have an area for components, and then sub areas for each circuit or each component or each component type or whatever fit my fancy.

I have used references to other MathCAD documents as a means to segregate and provide heirarchy. It works pretty well when I have a big header section like with component definitions, but this is less than ideal in several scenarios where I'd like to just add an sub-area for some note or some side calculation.

Am I alone in this wish? Is everyone else happy with a single level of heirarchy in their MathCAD worksheets?

[ValeryOchkov]

It is old problem

See http://communities.ptc.com/message/124207#124207

[ptc-4163714]

Hi Valery, I saw that post. However nothing has been done to add the feature through all these years. Is it such a tough feature to implement? Or is it just that so few people would actually use it? Or is it just that very little development is occurring on the platform.

To me, since the purpose of the tool is to organize math... math that I could perform in many other tools but that MathCAD is very good at organizing clearly... then this feature is almost fundamental.

[Fred_Kohlhepp]

Might consider putting resistors, capacitors, etc. each in it's own file, then putting references to those inside a collapsed area at the top of your sheet. Mathcad 15 has areas, I'm not sure that made it into Prime yet.

[StuartBruff]

Daniel Ousley wrote:

Hi Valery, I saw that post. However nothing has been done to add the feature through all these years. Is it such a tough feature to implement? Or is it just that so few people would actually use it? Or is it just that very little development is occurring on the platform.

To me, since the purpose of the tool is to organize math... math that I could perform in many other tools but that MathCAD is very good at organizing clearly... then this feature is almost fundamental.

I do not know what the problem is, but it is unlikely to be difficulty of implementation - it might have been an issue in the Mathcad 4..15 series, but given the long-standing nature of this (and many other requests), PTC should have been able to wrap it up into the Prime re-design.

[ValeryOchkov]

I use subareas in my "cloud" Mathcad-functions. See the picture and try the attached Mathcad 15 file:

[rag]

Can not see any subareas, which you asked for, in Valerys document. Probably his point is, that you can split your inital sections into separete worksheets and reference them from your main document - as Fred already pointed out in his post.

This feature is a long standing wish of the community. I remember darkly a discussion (here or better yet in the collab) about that wish and I think someone was able to copy an area from outside into another region, thus nesting areas. I just tried it with Mathcad 15 and failed. Anyway - that workoround was considered dangerous because it is not documented and so there is no guarantee it would work in future releases (probably exactly that happened).

WR

[ValeryOchkov]

winfrod rager wrote:

...because it is not documented and so there is no guarantee it would work in future releases (probably exactly that happened).

WR

What is it our life!? Our life is a series of undocumented tricks...