A Sneak Peek Into Mathcad Prime 9
Enhancements:
With Mathcad Prime 9 now well into its development, PTC has showcased some of the new functionality as part of the Mathcad Virtual Conference 2022. As with the previous release of Mathcad Prime 8, it looks like we will see plenty of usability enhancements to the software, but these are also balanced with enhancements to the calculation functionality within the software. Mathcad Prime 9 is currently scheduled for release in March 2023. The following are some of the features that will be in the new version:
Usability Enhancements:
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PTC has said this was one of the most requested features. The new text styles will be available on the text formatting tab, where you will be able to create, edit and delete text styles. There’s the functionality to change various Font and paragraph options as well as a preview box of what these changes will look like in a paragraph. These text styles can then be applied to selected text, entire regions, or multiple selected regions at once.
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Providing the ability to link from and to regions in the worksheet. This is described as using a system of applying a tag to any region as a destination and linking to another piece of text as a source. Clicking on the link will scroll the worksheet to display the region that was tagged.
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By clicking on the page number in the bottom left of Mathcad you will have the ability to then type in the number of the page you want to navigate to. There’s also going to be a keyboard shortcut to quickly get to this option. Navigating large documents will be easier.
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You will see a page number near your cursor when using the scroll bar on the right hand of the page.
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Anywhere in the UI where there’s a colour selection, there’s a ‘More Colours’ option, which will open a colour selection. There’s then the option to change RGB or HSL values.
Numeric Engine Enhancement:
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This can be used with a partial differential operator in a solve block to define the function for the Pdesolve. In legacy Mathcad, a dot notation was used, so there are plans to allow a similar way of defining a partial derivative. This will be in the form of a subscript notation.
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This operator has been added to Prime.
Symbolic Engine Enhancements:
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In Mathcad Prime 9, you can solve ordinary differential equations symbolically using the solve keyword.
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The functions list will be expanded to include these.
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The ability to use the Find function as part of a symbolic evaluation in a solve block.
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The assumed keyword functionality has been expanded so you will be able to be used it with a function e.g “f(x)<0” and other applications.
Hopefully, this has provided you with some insight into what to expect from Prime 9. There will likely be more content from PTC on this as we get closer to the release date, and there’s no reason to believe that this is a complete list of all the improvements.
Ways to give feedback:
PTC emphasised the importance of customer feedback. They keep a database of customer feedback which is used to inform PTC’s decisions on when and how they implement functionality into Mathcad Prime. It is important to provide feedback even if you think it has been heard before by PTC.
Contact Technical Support – If you are supported by a reseller such as us (Root Solutions) we can look at your specific case and discuss your feedback with PTC.
Community Ideas Site – Contribute to the community site by suggesting ideas and voting on functionality that you want to see in Mathcad. The community ideas site can be found here.
Please note features described that were shown in the webinar by PTC are subject to change.
Want to speak to an expert to find out more?
Or maybe you want to pre-empt the new release? Then be sure to get in contact.