Say Hello to Mathcad Prime 10

PTC Mathcad Prime is the industry standard for engineering mathematics software. It enables you to solve your most complex problems and share your engineering calculations.   

For all current or soon-to-be Mathcad users, the spring season is always exciting due to the annual release of a new Mathcad Prime version. As of writing this blogpost, Mathcad Prime 10 is just around the corner and will be released to the public in a few days.  

The new version will add some new features that the current user base has requested for a long time. These new features will enhance your workflow and leverage your calculation capabilities even further.  

In addition to the fact that PTC has developed its own symbolic engine, which was first implemented in Prime 6, I get the impression that this might be the biggest release update since Prime 4.   

Here are some examples of new features and refinements in Mathcad Prime 10 that will make you even more productive: 

Application enhancements  

Advanced Controls with Scripting  

Prime 10 now offers the ability to add various advanced controls within the worksheets, such as list boxes, radio buttons, checkboxes, sliders, and text boxes. These controls and their behaviors can then be changed and controlled using scripting language such as VBScript and Jscript. This gives the user more control over the functionality of each “control object” and thus can be tailored to your specific needs. This feature is well known in the legacy Mathcad and is now a very warm addition to the Prime platform.   

Subscript and superscript in text  

It is now possible to apply subscripts and superscripts in various text regions. This is great for documentation and allows the user to create more seamless text when moving between text regions and math regions. 

Choice of solving algorithms 

In Prime 10, you now have the ability to choose which solving algorithm you would prefer when solving for some functions and definite integrals. This option applies to pdesolve, odesolve, numol, genfit, polyroots, find, minimize, maximize, and minerr, and algorithms for calculating definite integrals. Right click with your mouse button over the current function and there you have the options of “go with the default” or chose another option. It enables the user to explore and evaluate your results with various solving algorithms quickly and easily.  

Numeric engine enhancements 

Improved calculus operators 

Prime 10 comes with general engine improvements, specifically improvements in pdesolve, where users now have the ability to set mixed boundary conditions along with implicit and explicit boundary conditions. Another feature that has been added is unit support. Finally, the numeric engine has improved its handling of inline assignment evaluations in a matrix and unitless zero in a matrix.  

Multithreading 

The multithreading functionality has been in Prime for several years, but this time, PTC has made some serious effort to significantly increase performance when handling and executing several independent calculations. By further leveraging your multicore processor, you can expect an increase in performance and, thus, a smoother user experience. 

Symbolic engine enhancements: 

• New “standard” keyword 
  • The keyword “standard” has been added to the overall toolset. This allows the user to use Big-O notation with series expansion, showing the constant integration in indefinite integrals. 
• Improved support for “undefined” 
  • Prime 10 provides improved support for “undefined” results when using the symbolic engine, thus resulting in improved compatibility with the numeric engine “NaN” statements, and it allows the symbolic engine to handle the “NaN” class of functions.  
• Expanded use of the keyword “fully” 
  • The keyword “fully” has been expanded with more use cases and in addition, support for modifiers such as “fact” and “max” has also been added.  
• General keyword improvements  
  • Prime 10 provides more use cases for “solve” and “simplify.”  
  • The keyword “rewrite” has been expanded with five new modifiers as “arg,” “atan2”, “fact,” “sign,” and “f,” which allows the user to rewrite expressions in their respective terms. 

Usability enhancements 

• Date functionality  
  • More date formats have been added to the headers and footers. You can now set the world-date and system-date format.   
• Collapsible area 
  • You can now hide the collapsible area border, which also applies when printing your worksheet. 
• Expanded link functionality 
  • It is now possible to link to a region in another worksheet.   
• Include worksheet region 
  • You now can directly open the worksheet that is referenced in the include worksheet region. 
• Legacy converter 
  • You can now open a file directly from the converter itself. 

Introduction to Mathcad Prime 10 – 30th of May

I will be hosting a webinar on the 30th of May at 10 am, an introduction to Mathcad Prime 10 and during this webinar session we will take a look at some of the new features in Mathcad Prime and we will focus on some of the features that will benefit users the most.

Register for webinar – Introduction to Mathcad Prime 10

Thank you for reading – All the best!

Johan Wikblad, Technical MathCAD Specialist