Mathcad 14 upgrade

[IFRs]

I've seen this question on the forum but not recently and at least one of the old threads was closed, so here it goes again:

Is MathCAD 14 a worthy upgrade from 13? The price is about $220 now. My issues with v13 are mostly speed of starting, speed of calculating through a long document and little things like I always save in R12 because it is faster and results in smaller files but there is no way to set it to do that. I don't use much of the real power of MathCAD but it is a daily tool I would not want to be without. I also don't want to get caught in a very expensive upgrade to V15 or V16 because I did not get V14.

Thought out there??

 

[zdas04]

After a couple of horrible experiences I don't buy or install even numbered versions of MathCad. I thought that V12 was going to melt my hard disk before I got it exorcised.

Add to their miserable track record with every other version being busted, this is version 1.0 for PTC and anyone who buys version 1.0 of anything is asking for trouble.

V13 is working quite well for me thank you.

David

 

[IRstuff]

Actually, M14 was written by Mathsoft, just before they were purchased. Nonetheless, M14 is probably more stable and faster than M13. However, it really depends on what you're looking for it to do.

For most of my problems, M6 would probably be adequate, and faster.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[PNachtwey]

I have Mathcad V13. One of our engineers went out and bought the latest Mathcad V14 and found it that it would not solve problems V13 did. Scroll down to the next page. We sent the files in and never got a reply.

So now this one engineer has a Mathcad 14 that will not solve some of the problems Mathcad 13. We wanted to know if he could step back to v14, no reply.

There is still an open case number for this.

Mathcad has some glaring limitations that I find are killers. The lack of local static variables for one. There are cases where passing the variable out and back in do work as when solving ODEs and the forcing function is a PID. The state of the integrator can't be saved or returned and then passed back to the PID. If the PID could same the integrator state internally that would be fine. This is the flaw that has led me to the conclusion, no more.

 

[IRstuff]

M14 uses a different symbolic solver from ANY previous version of Mathcad. To that extent, it is a version 1 for symbolic.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[biff44]

If you have a company that will buy it for you, sure, why not?

But if you are an independent, I would advise dropping mathcad and migrating to matlab. that is what I am going to do.

I fairly recently upgraded to mathcad 13, and then mathcad got sold and the new company would not even answer my questions about a year later unless I upgraded to 14. That type of customer service is unacceptable.

I also do not like the way there is no version converter available, so for you to download a V14 file, convert it, and run it in V13. That means you will be doomed to an annual expense of upgrading to the new version every year.

As bad as Bill Gates is, I can still run Excel spreadsheets I made 10 years ago!

 

[pstuckey]

Be careful with the fine print in the offer, I believe they are only selling the latest release to maintenance customers. If you are purchasing a single user license you get the first bug patch, but not the second one.

Peter

 

[IRstuff]

The upgrade policy is already discussed in: thread552-215852

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[TLeeETF]

If a big change to 14 is the switch from Maple to Mupad for the symbolic engine, the other option might be to consider full Maple. The Maple UI is very Mathcad-like these days and it'll likely have symbolic results more consistent with 13 and prior and it'll have full programming and big numerics like Matlab (mentioned in this thread). I was told that they're giving a "cross-grade" price to Mathcad users where they receive the same upgrade price to Maple users ... might be worth a look.