Mathcad Calculations
Alexandrie Gallup
PTC Mathcad Prime allows you to solve, analyze, document, and share your engineering calculations. You need a comprehensive yet intuitive application that performs accurate calculations, enables traceability, protects intellectual property, and allows you to show your work.
Document your calculations in an engineering notebook with natural mathematical notation and units intelligence. Show your work using rich formatting options alongside plots, text, and images in a single, professionally formatted document.
Studies now report that for teams that use basic spreadsheets for their engineering mathematics, the resulting calculations often contain serious flaws. In fact, a study from KPMG found that 91% of spreadsheets taken from an industry sample contained errors. And see what these consulting firms discovered (Infographic).
My understanding of the new MathCad Prime is that it does not support Areas that can be collapsed or locked. This feature is used by my company to manage calculations. The calcluations within the area have been carefully authored, checked, and certified. We lock the area so that no one can tamper with the calculations. The user of the sheet would only have access to input variables.
Areas that can be collapsed or locked. This feature is used by my company to manage calculations. The calcluations within the area have been carefully authored, checked, and certified. We lock the area so that no one can tamper with the calculations. The user of the sheet would only have access to input variables.
Mathcad Prime 1.0 does not include collapsed or locked areas. We will be adding that feature to a future release of Mathcad Prime, so if you need to use locked and collapsed areas, you should stick with Mathcad 15 for now.
Worksheets from all previous versions of Mathcad can be converted into Mathcad Prime 1.0. It uses Mathcad 15 M005 in the background to do the conversion, so you do need to install Mathcad 15 M005. However, you only need to convert once, you don't need to convert your files into Mathcad 15, then Mathcad Prime.
Areas in earlier files become regular regions in Mathcad Prime 1.0, separated by page breaks. If you have a locked area in the source worksheet, you need to unlock it before converting the worksheet to Mathcad Prime 1.0.
It sounds like I need to upgrade to 15 and stick with that for awhile. I'm not opposed to Prime's new features, but its seems like a step back with regard to calculation management. MathCad was always advertised to companies as a way to certify company calcs. The Prime version is not going to work for us right now.
I am using Mathcad Prime 7.0 7.0.0.0
I have just finished converting a Mathcad 15 worksheet to Prime. The worksheet is around 200 pages of simple calculations. The worksheet features 1 page where parameters are input.
Matchad 15 calculated any changes to the input parameters almost instantly. Maybe 2-3 seconds max.
Whereas the Prime sheet is incredibly slow. taking up to 32 minutes to finish calculating.
there are no complex calculations to be conducted so it is worrying that the newer version of prime is under performing compared to the older version mathcad 15.
Has anyone faced this issue and found any solutions?
Amen that. I check now for a magic bullet that has thus far escaped PTC. I'll be retired before Prime has anything close to what I do with Mathcad 15. A shame and loss for the Math / Engineering community. If PTC has a reason for hope, please share.
Have you been in contact with tech support about the issue you see? Do you have a tech support case number you can share with me? That is the best way for issues - including performance issues - to be seen by the Mathcad R&D team. If you haven't and would like to, please direct message me and we can discuss how we can get the relevant information from you to begin looking into your specific issue. If your worksheet is available for us to look at ourselves, I can get both the R&D team and our subject matter expert team to take a look at it to identify what is causing the performance slowdown.
Mathcad Prime is based on different architecture to Mathcad 15.0, and we do get feedback from customers on particular performance differences between the two applications. I understand it's frustrating - performance improvement is an ongoing task for us. Feedback like this really helps us identify where enhancements need to be made, so I do appreciate this information.
I also have a 200 page long program with simple calculations. In past, if I changed a variable value in MathCad 15, the whole sheet would be solved in a few seconds (5 sec most) - all numbers on the screen will be updated. However, in the PTC Mathcad, if I change just one variable value, it will takes 30 min or more to update numbers on the screen. Changing 3-4 variables crashes program - providing error message like 'unresolved Exception ..' providing no clue to the issue. I was happy with MathCAD 15, but PTC has made it unfunctional - now I can't print out matrix values on the screen.
Although the functionality of Prime 10 has improved in terms of features it is still very lacking in basic calculation speed. I have raised these issues for over 18 months and PTC seems to just ignore them and carry on regardless. My preference in all of this was to have a 64-bit version of Mathcad 15 and I stand by that statement, not that this is going to happen. This would require a company that cares about what their customers want. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be PTC. By the time MC15 is retired I will still not be able to fully convert my MC15 worksheets to Prime since it will not have Animation, which I use extensively and a trace capability to debug programs, it is also cripplingly slow and at times unusable. This is at best very disappointing but also very sad to see an excellent program like Mathcad 15 killed by an inferior replacement that does not hack it.
I'm up to Prime 9.0 now and I still run into the same issue as well. We generate calc sheets that are 20 - 30 pp long, with calcs interwoven with text, and calculations that used to take a few seconds now takes a couple of minutes. One would think that by version 9.0 most of the performance issues would be worked out. At what point will Prime be on par with legacy Mathcad? I think enough people have complained that PTC needs to prioritize this.
Here we are, one year later, one revision later (prime 10), still suffering the same issue. I'm in progress of converting my first of more than 50, 300 plus page MathCAD 15 worksheets over to prime as the deadline is looming like a storm on the horizon. I have to separate into 50 page blocks to get the converter to run. Then reformat and copy/paste into a fresh build and from what I can see, the first 100 pages are so slow that I can type a variable and then sit back to wait for it to appear. I'm about 5 weeks in to converting ONE worksheet and not finished (mind you I never get a full 10 hour day to work on this, usually about 2 to 3 hours dedicated to the conversion process). Makes it difficult to justify renewing software for $$$$ that just requires thousands of hours to get back to where I was. Someone prior stated they'd be retired before Prime>MathCAD 15 and I always hoped I'd be retired before they eliminated 15 but I've got many years left and a dismal outlook on this future.
I first noticed this problem when I half the time I tried to calculate my sheet, and I would notice mathcad would get "stuck" trying to multiply two matrices (one of the matrices is an inverse of another which mathcad had worked out prior). Once it gets stuck it wont ever finish and I cant stop the calculation without exiting mathcad entirely. This tended to happen about half the time I tried to calculate the sheet and the other half it would work fine, without spending hardly any time on that particular calculation.
This is becoming quite frustrating as the sheets can take a long time to do the calculations let alone when I end up wasting the time because it will get stuck later on in the sheet and I have to close it and start again
The sheet is 2.4MB and the part that it tends to get stuck on at those points th matrices arent that big, only about 300x300. There are other places where there are vectors in matrices that can have 1000s of rows/columns where I havent had problems with it doing the calculations.
As Mike says, without the worksheet it is impossible to say what is really happening. Try shutting down and restarting Mathcad before loading the worksheet. That shouldn't be necessary, but as noted in the thread Mike referenced, it seems that sometimes it is.
Maybe, although without seeing the worksheet there is no way to be sure. If you have a lot of intermediate results being calculated you should either change the worksheet to get rid of them or put the intermediate calculations into a program. Even if you use the same worksheet variable name for all the intermediate results, a second assignment to the name does not overwrite the contents of the first assignment. It creates a new copy of the variable, with it's own memory requirements, and there is no way for you to free that memory. However, if you put intermediate calculations in a program, then when the program exits the memory used by local program variables is freed.
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