Things you love/hate with mathcad 2

[weikequ]

Hey guys, I'm a structural turned software engineer and I'm building a mathcad-ish alternative (primarily due to the lack of care and innovation PTC's shown for the software). I'm really curious about the things you love or hate about the software. Maybe PTC can also see this thread and then I can go back to just using mathcad lol. For me:

Awesome
- handling units
- displaying/typing math in a really natural way

Not awesome
- lack of integration points with my other tools
- no sketches
- PTC hasn't done anything really great to improve the software in like 10+ years

 

[JoelTXCive]

I was a happy Smath user until late 2024. Our IT department said we were no longer allowed to use Russian based software programs, so we had to switch away from Smath.

We looked at several computational software packages, but elected to go with MathCAD. (We do work in Florida, and FDOT has calculation sheets in MathCAD)

Things that drive me crazy about MathCAD.......

1) There is no "Autocomplete" or "Intellisense" - You have to retype your variables over and over again. Smath (which was Free) and all other software packages I'm aware of remember your variables. Once you declare a variable, you only need to type the first few letters before the software Autocompletes the variable. This is a huge timesaver when working with large files and lots of variables.

2) Text Alignment - In Smath you can highlight several rows of text or calculations and select "Align Horizontally" or "Align Vertically." Again, this is a huge timesaver on large files when you need to get the calculations visually looking good. In MathCAD you have to go line by line and attempt to snap them to a grid. It's tedious and annoying.

It blows my mind that PTC has not added these features to their program........

 

[PNachtwey]

I first started using Mathcad back in the early 90s. I think it was Mathcad 3 or 4. What I liked about it was the symbolic processing. I stopped updating Mathcad 13 because the symbolic processor was changed and not as good in Mathcad 14. I tried Mathematica. It was OK. I could solve a few problems that Mathcad 13 could not. I tried wxMaxima which is much better for symbolic processing than Mathcad 13, but it has bugs and the gnuplot is lacking Plots were bit mapped which made life more difficult for the magazine editors. Sometimes they had to completely remake my plots for magazine articles. The same goes for equations. Python allows me to output plots in many different formats but most significantly .svg. This allows the editor to scale up or down the plots. Python also allows me to output formulas in LaTex. LaTeX can be embedded in the newer versions of word. When I sent the articles to the editor, I would always send the separate .svg and LaTeX files. This was not possible with Mathcad.

I now use python's sympy. Itis kind of a hack but it works, and the output options are much better.

One of the problems I see in all the CAS systems is that they don't recursively optimize or simplify parts of the code that can be simplified. Sometime Mathcad will provide and solution but then I must spend hours simplifying parts of it by hand. I once solved a problem using Given Find that resulted in 180 pages of code. The answer was unusable because it was so long. There were many square roots and third root parts that were repeated over and over and over again. I started by assigning these radicals to a letter and making substitutions. This reduced the length of the solution significantly. Then I was FINALLY able to see the individual trees in the forest and as able to simplify things even more. Now scrolling back and forth through the solution didn't take minutes to update.

Here is an example of pythons's sympy in jupyterlab

seg1234567

It is possible to do this in vscode too. It has excellent editing and debugging capabilities. I am never going back to Mathcad.
However, because I have 30+ years of Mathcad files in the company archives, the company I retired from bought a copy of Mathcad? to access my old files.
I bet they have barely looked at them.

Python will generate code. I use this all the time. Below is an example of generating code then I copy and paste it below

circle3pts

 

[dik]

Our IT department said we were no longer allowed to use

That's why I always used my laptop and uploaded files as required at the end of the day. IT was a 'profit centre' and they made more money if they saved it on hardware...

 

[271828]

Maple Flow looks interesting, but it seems to be more of an iteration of the symbolic Maple engine. One of the things I use Mathcad for is table driven calculations that would otherwise require something like Matlab, but I don't do programming.

I tried Maple Flow. It is a faint shadow of Mathcad. I really wanted to like it.

 

[271828]

I've been using MC prime a lot for the last 18 months. In general, I like it, and use it a lot.

Biggest gripe: no way to see the same sheet in a split screen or multiple windows. Utterly f'ing ridiculous in 2025.

Second biggest gripe: The keyboard shortcut for subscript went from . to Ctrl -. One of the dumbest moves imaginable.

 

[271828]

A few other gripes.

(The positives are pretty obvious, so the motivation behind listing gripes is to encourage competitors to not do these things. There seems like little hope PTC will be responsive. Also, maybe I'm wrong about some of these and there is a way to do them in MCP. If so, I'd love to hear the remedies!)

When I copy a figure into MCP v10, it often comes in 5-10x wider than the screen. Best I can tell, there's no way to click the image and say "6 in." wide or whatever, like one can do in every other program in the universe, so finding the middle of an edge and mouse dragging it to resize is about all that's left. To make matters worse, the little squares at the edges of the image become so small that they're impossible to see. I zoom in and scroll around looking for them. It often takes a solid minute or longer to resize an image so it fits on the page. This is a big deal when you do that 20x in a few hours.

It's too hard to debug and trace into functions. Error messages are way too brief and non-descriptive.

I don't think there's any way to change the default math output. For example, if I compute a value of 1750, it show up as 1.75*10^3. I select a result and change it to decimal, and then change the number of digits literally dozens of times per day. Allowing us to set a default of decimal and SIGNIFICANT FIGURES, not decimal places would save a lot of time.

If entries in a matrix have different units, then you have to take whatever MCP chooses, and it often chooses very poorly for legibility. For example, one stiffness entry might show up in lb/s^2 and I'll want to change it to kip/in. Another will show up as lbf when I want it to say kip*in/in. Now I have one with lb mass and another with lbf. If I have such matrices, the options are to go unitless (ugh) or just don't hit = after the matrix except when I really want to inspect it.

Whomever designed the appearance of the plots should be beaten. The following is from their website. Everywhere else in the universe, x, goes on the x-axis, not near the -y axis. Also, sin(x) should go on the +y axis or on the left side of the plot, rotated 90 deg. I don't know what someone is supposed to do with that plot. It certainly can't go into a report or paper. Dump the vectors to Excel and plot there? I find myself using Octave for anything that needs a plot.

 

[Stick.]

I don't think there's any way to change the default math output.

If you change the math formatting to decimal without selecting any specific math item (so just click on some blank space in the calculation area and then change the formatting), it will change the default math formatting for that specific document.

If you use your own custom template for creating new documents (which I highly recommend), and you do the above formatting change on that custom template, it will then mean that every new document will have the desired math formatting as the default.

For more info on templates if you don't already use them:

PTC Help Center

Unfortunately this doesn't address significant figures (which is a huge miss for a math and units focused program). There really should be a format/setting to automatically handle significant figures, including recognizing that inputting "6.0in" is different from "6.000in"

A similar gripe is that I can't define a custom unit system or default worksheet units. I work primarily in US units, with lengths in inches, yet I can only get Mathcad Prime to default to outputting lengths in feet, so I'm constantly changing the units on calculation results.

 

[MJKing]

I sent the following to my PTC reseller a few yars ago and have brought it up whenever asked how I like the new version of Prime. I think I even logged a few cases on the PTC website a few years back and not much has happened.

"I have started to use Prime but to be honest the limitations compared to MathCad 15 really make it difficult to justify using it for everything. The following four examples of these limitations come immediately to mind, these are big items and I am sure I could find other nits to pick.

1. Prime will not translate a MathCad 15 file directly and let it be used immediately, it generates a flurry of error messages that need to be hand edited before the worksheet will function. I do not understand why a new version requires this much hand editing to get things working again when everything functioned properly in MathCad 15. A 15 or 20 page worksheet can take hours to fix and I have hundreds if not thousands of worksheet I would still like to use (I am an almost daily MathCad user since the late 1980's starting with MathCad 4).

2. Many of the translation problems are tied to the plotting of data. Prime will not allow a graph title, axis labels, or grid lines which are all required before a graph is presentable to peers or copied and inserted into a technical document. MathCad 15 does this very well so for some reason it was not pushed into any version of Prime. Excel has better plotting capabilities compared to Prime. You cannot create technical quality documentation using plots from Prime.

3. The text boxes do not allow subscripts or superscripts (I thing Greek letters are also a problem) so again the ability to produce technical documentation is severely limited. This can be done in Word so I don't understand the limitation in Prime, MathCad 15 can do this in text boxes.

4. If you have a collapsed area in Prime, and reopen it for editing the program inserts enough space to allow the expanded area to fit in the worksheet. Then once the changes are made you can collapse the area but Prime leaves the open space, this can be multiple blank pages that need to be removed by the user by hand to restore the worksheet to the original readable flowing format. Again, MathCad 15 does this automatically.

I think the interface for Prime is really good but the simple functionality used by most experienced users are missing even after at least 10 releases of Prime. MathCad is an amazing tool and once many engineers experience what it can do it becomes an invaluable asset (I have two daughters who I introduced Prime to in their engineering undergraduate years and they immediately put it to use in their classes, I don't know why MatLab is a university standard and not MathCad). Why doesn't Prime exceed the capabilities of MathCad 15, it should after the number of years spent in development? IMO right now Prime is a very limited engineering tool missing many fundamental capabilities found in MathCad 15 and earlier version of MathCad."

I really would like them to bring Prime up to the capabilities of MathCad 15 and allow importing older worksheets with a minimum amount of hand editting, but I am not holding my breath. The primitive plotting is a huge issue for me.

 

[271828]

If you change the math formatting to decimal without selecting any specific math item (so just click on some blank space in the calculation area and then change the formatting), it will change the default math formatting for that specific document.

If you use your own custom template for creating new documents (which I highly recommend), and you do the above formatting change on that custom template, it will then mean that every new document will have the desired math formatting as the default.

For more info on templates if you don't already use them:

PTC Help Center

Unfortunately this doesn't address significant figures (which is a huge miss for a math and units focused program). There really should be a format/setting to automatically handle significant figures, including recognizing that inputting "6.0in" is different from "6.000in"

A similar gripe is that I can't define a custom unit system or default worksheet units. I work primarily in US units, with lengths in inches, yet I can only get Mathcad Prime to default to outputting lengths in feet, so I'm constantly changing the units on calculation results.

Stick,

Thanks so much for helping with the default math format. I have a custom template, so that issue is totally fixed.

271828

 

[IRstuff]

re. point #2, OG Mathcad also had a number of issues with graphing, and I always transferred data to Excel if I wanted to make presentation quality graphs. MCP fixed a number of OG MC's graphing issues, including a chronic issue with a teensy offset in the axes, relative to the curve, in addition to making scaling changes easier.

Moreover, OG's graphs were instantaneously recognizable as coming from Mathcad, which wasn't necessarily what I wanted.

 

[System Protection]

I'll add another MC Prime annoyance. If you are paging up and your cursor lands in a text box you will enter in it and will have to click outside of the box to continue paging up.

 

[Sparweb]

OG's graphs were instantaneously recognizable as coming from Mathcad, which wasn't necessarily what I wanted

It is what I wanted everyone to know: "I'm not some punter with Excel; this is Mathcad, here so sharpen your pencils."