Mathcad Prime 3.0 is planned for release in the latter half of 2013, promising stronger documentation and presentation, and delivering capabilities that will help engineering teams achieve higher efficiency through standardization and re-use. I had the opportunity to sit down with Mark Walker, Director of Product Management, to discuss Mathcad Prime 3.0 – as well as take a look at an early development build of the software.
Walker and the Mathcad team have received a lot of feedback from early adopters of Mathcad Prime, and a common theme of requests called for better documentation and presentation. Here are a few feature-level updates that the Mathcad team is actively developing keeping in mind this theme:
- Templates: Templates help teams standardize both the presentation and content of design documentation. The ability to also manage shared templates ensures documentation compliance. It also ensures adherence to design guidelines across team members, by building design checklists and references that leverage the breadth of the available worksheet features, as well as the new ones planned for introduction in Mathcad Prime 3.0.
- Math-in-text: Improved by the new UI paradigms of the environment, this feature building off of past versions of Mathcad allows authors to create live math regions in-line with their textual presentations, offering a tight and readable flow to their reports when required.
- Superscripts/subscripts in text, Greek character support: This is complementary to the returned support of math-in-text. The reality is that such characters are not only required within the live math regions of a worksheet – they are also required within the textual descriptions that surround and describe them.
- Spellchecker: Mathcad Prime 3.0 is planned to include a spellchecker for all pertinent ship-to locales, including user-expected behaviors such as identifying misspellings as they are typed.
- Math-specific formatting and highlighting: Currently available for text regions only, the expansion of region formatting to math regions will allow customers’ entire documents to be fine-tuned to fit the page better, maintain consistency in presentation, and improve readability. This will help users to draw a reader’s attention to specific results of the worksheet.
- Text styles: Text styles allow forusers to quickly control the presentation of their worksheets in an ad-hoc fashion, but can also be combined with templates to become more prescriptive when generating certain types of reports or analyses.
- Improved ad-hoc copy/paste between other applications: It is a common practice for some engineering teams to collaborate by copying Mathcad content (e.g. plots) and pasting them into an email for transmission. Similarly, Microsoft PowerPoint is a common medium for conducting design reviews, and Microsoft Word remains a common final documentation format for extended teams. Mathcad Prime 3.0 will support the direct copying of content to be pasted into all of those mediums.
Walker assured me that they have been listening to the feedback from early adopters of Mathcad Prime 1.0 and 2.0, again aiming to focus on this strong documentation and presentation theme. While those plans comprise the primary part of the release plan, customers should expect two major integrations for Mathcad Prime 3.0 as well: an improved integration with Creo, and a newly introduced integration with Integrity.
Stay tuned for the next couple of days and check out my next blog post on Mathcad Prime 3.0 functionality features.
Thank you! Highlighting was really needed. Great job on adding that! It was the one missing thing that prevented us from upgrading to prime. We use it extensively for code checks, input zones, and other things.
Great! The Mathcad team really makes an effort to listen to and understand user feedback so it’s nice to hear that one of your needs was met! Stay tuned to learn more about new functionality!
Are there any future plans of conditional formatting like Excel has. It would really be useful for unity/code checks (example: if unity is less than one, the math region is green, if unity is greater than 1, math region is red). And will the “character inside brackets” as well as the “special characters into math regions” to define variables be available in Prime 3? Other than that, Prime 3 may be the version we switch over to from 15. Nice improvements.
Hi there and thanks for your comments and question. Yes, we are planning on adding conditional formatting of results as a feature of Mathcad in the future. You are not alone and it is a common request. Unfortunately, there are other higher priority capabilities needed/ requested for Mathcad Prime 3.0, but this is definitely under consideration for Mathcad Prime 4.0.
I’m trying to expand my capabilities in linear algebra with Prime 2.0. I hope Prime 3.0 will provide more built in functions. Right now I’m having problems with the built in functions of Prime 2.0. The function matrix (m, n, f) according to help is just what I want, but it’s not working for me. Are there examples anywhere?
Hello Thomas,
I suggest you post your issue along with a worksheet to the Mathcad Community at http://communities.ptc.com/community/mathcad. A more experienced user should be able to help you out.
It’s a little hard to search for matrix, among the many worksheets that mention it, but searching for linear algebra might work.
You could also search in http://www.ptc.com/appserver/search/mathcad.jsp,
Good luck!
Mona
Please do not forget to update the GUI in Prime 3.0:
- there are several types of fonts in the GUI. There should be only one = the Windows default one. Set all GUI fonts to MS Shell Dlg 2);
- respect the font ClearType Windows setting (when is OFF in Windows, must be off in Mathcad);
- switching between documents with Ctrl+Tab is bringing a new window on top ???
- no way to insert WMF, EMF;
- when right clicking on the page, the tab title font is turning from bold to regular;
- now way to change GUI color (is always blue. No gray, silver or black theme);
- all icons are blurry. Please make them sharper, like in Office 2010;
- change the ribbon type. The one in Prime 2.0 (with the orb) looks old. Make it like in Office 2010.
- cannot add/remove buttons to Quick Access toolbar;
- no X button for closing the tabs;
- button selection is blue on ribbon and yellow on right click menu;
Thank you.
Regarding the GUI, you can use in Mathcad the ribbon you have in Creo.
In this way you can have a unified GUI for your software.
Tienen planes de incorporar algunas herramientes de dibujo para poder efectuar esquemas cuando se trabaja?. Es algo sumamente importante. No se necesita ningun programa CAD, solo algo sencillo para esquemas como los que dispone Microsoft Visio.
I have the same question as Guillermo above. In case anyone doesn’t read Spanish I’ll translate it here:
(La pregunta de Guillermo traducido al ingles:)
Do you have plans to incorporate any drawing tools so that we can make diagrams or sketches? This is extremely important. It doesn’t have to be a full-featured CAD program, just something simple to make diagrams, similar to Microsoft Visio.
(In my opinion this would be a nice to have, not necessarily a must as long as we can import pictures or drawings from other applications.)
John