PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 Features and Functions
PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 delivers new capabilities that allow engineers to optimize their critical design processes
Global Definitions
Variable
definitions are the backbone of your PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 worksheets. Some
variables are specific to individual calculation steps and some will be
utilized throughout the worksheet.
The Global
Definition operator allows you to define and evaluate a variable anywhere in
your worksheet without having to worry about calculation order. This makes both
worksheet management and documentation presentation easier – constants and
parameters can be defined as ‘true’ throughout your worksheet and can be placed
close to the end result of the calculation to support ‘what if’ analyses, as
well as for clear and concise presentation of your work.
Math in Text
PTC Mathcad Prime
3.0 is the industry standard for engineering calculations and a simple and
presentable text flow is important for easy to read, easy to interpret
worksheets based on those calculations.
PTC Mathcad Prime
3.0 allows math and text to be seamlessly integrated to provide a natural text
flow that increases the readability of your worksheet definitions, design notes
and explanatory text. Live math can be inserted, pasted and moved anywhere
within text to augment worksheet presentation with content that will update on
upstream changes in calculation. By enabling math within text, PTC Mathcad
Prime 3.0 allows you much greater scope with your worksheet presentation.
Templates
Do you find you
always start a worksheet with the same header content, margin size and initial
variable definitions? Instead of having to create that content every time you
want to start a new worksheet, with PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 you can create a
template that includes all that content and simply use that as the basis for
every new worksheet you create.
PTC Mathcad Prime
3.0 Templates save you time and effort by providing the ability to define and
organize desired content in such a way as to allow simple and structured re-use
in creating new worksheets. Anything you can do with a worksheet, be it adding
calculation content or changing documentation formatting, can be saved in a
template. Documents can be standardized, IP can be captured and your desired format
can be reused as often as you need. PTC supplies several default templates as
examples that can be used as is or as a basis for your own templates. You can
also create, edit and store personal or company defined templates in locations
easy to configure and access through the software.
Math Formatting
As a fully
functional engineering calculation documentation tool, PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0
already supports standard text formatting. To allow even greater worksheet
documentation flexibility you can now format your live math too.
Math font, font
size, color and highlight can be changed to suit personal, company or industry
standard documentation expectations. You can now do things such as direct
reader focus by highlighting important results, separate specific calculation
elements by assigning them different colors and match text formatting to
produce a more coherent reading experience for users of your worksheet. With
both text and math formatting you get the full suite of formatting options for
all your documentation needs.
Custom Functions
PTC Mathcad Prime
3.0 comes fully loaded with hundreds of built-in functions that cover a
multitude of engineering disciplines. With Custom Functions you can now write
and integrate your own functions, customizing your working environment to suit
whatever engineering needs you have. Whether you need specialized niche-market
engineering content, use personally modified versions of existing functions or
have an idea for a new function to optimize whatever engineering problem you
may be working on, Custom Functions allows you to write and install those
functions with the PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 environment so you can access them in
the worksheet and use them alongside existing content.
Advanced Numerics
PTC Mathcad Prime
3.0 continues to improve calculation capabilities. Building on the improvements
seen in Prime 2.0 (native 64-bit support, linear algebra, signal processing,
just to name a few), Prime 3.0 adds new matrix decompositions functions: LU, QR
and Cholesky. These functions replace the old lu, qr and cholesky counterparts.
The new functions are up to 100 times faster, provide extended capability (such
as pivoting, and complex number support) and return the result in easier to
work with format.
Continuous
improvement in calculation capability allows users evaluate a greater number
of, and more complex and computationally demanding, cases in less time,
ultimately leading to more optimal designs.
Excel Component
You’ve got a large
data set in Excel that’s critical to your design. But you don’t want to use
that tool for your calculations. PTC Mathcad‘s Excel component was designed for
exactly that problem. PTC Mathcad is the industry standard for engineering
calculations because it saves you time, reduces risk and integrates with many
tools you may already be using. The Excel component is extremely easy to use,
and allows you to leverage data in existing spreadsheets. No messy conversion
of data. No new tool to learn. When you combine the engineering power of PTC
Mathcad with the familiarity of Excel's tabular data capabilities, you’ll save
time and effort, improve visibility and sharing, and enjoy better integration
with legacy systems.
Symbolics
PTC Mathcad’s
symbolic calculation functionality goes a long way toward making your job
easier. Like many features in the software, it automates a task that is
cumbersome, time-consuming and risky if done manually. With symbolics, you can
set up the right form of a formula before plugging in the numbers. Routine updates
to downstream computations are managed automatically, so your documents remain
up to date even as your formulas change. Symbolic calculation even lets you put
derivation steps that are often done on paper right in the document so it’s
easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to verify.
Whether you’re
transferring knowledge, setting up standard calculations, showing those
calculations step-by-step, or verifying and validating a design—documents with
explicit derivation and calculations make the process easier, more effective,
and less error prone.
Solving Capabilities
PTC Mathcad is easy
to use, but it’s no simple calculator. Its advanced features, like solve
blocks, make it a powerful engineering tool. The solve block capability lets
you quickly and easily solve systems of linear, non-linear, and differential
equations. It lets you solve any number of equations and unknown variables –
you can analyze a wide variety of problems according to a set of constraints
that you specify. Enter as much or as little information as you need to solve
the problem. The software takes care of the rest. This saves you time, improves
your accuracy, and lets you do more without additional programming or tools.
Advanced Plotting
What if you had the
ability to look at your data in three dimensions, manipulate and adjust it,
before committing to a design? PTC Mathcad lets you do exactly that. It’s not
an engineering design tool, but it can save you from late stage design changes,
problems with prototyping, or making fast adjustments to changing customer
requirements. 3-D plotting in PTC Mathcad is simple to use, and incredibly
effective because it lets you work faster with fewer mistakes. Create a plot
with the click of a button; both surface and curved based plots automatically
rescale when you make adjustments to the data. Any engineer can easily
manipulate, analyze and visualize complex data right in the worksheet. The
result is a much more complete insight into the design intent, with better
documentation of calculations and easier, more accurate verification and
analysis.
