4 / Chapter 1 Welcome to Mathcad
toolbar. Online Help includes the Author’s Reference and Developer’s Reference for more advanced usage.
Mathcad simplifies and streamlines documentation, critical to communicating and to meeting business and quality assurance standards. By combining equations, text, and graphics in a single worksheet, Mathcad makes it easy to keep track of the most complex calculations. By saving your worksheets in XML format, you can reuse the information in other text-based systems or search and report on worksheets without needing to reopen them in Mathcad.
Highlights of the Mathcad 14 Release
Mathcad 14 features a number of improvements and added capabilities designed to increase your productivity. For more in-depth details and live examples see New Features under Tutorials in the Help menu.
Internationalization of Mathcad
•Languages: Mathcad and its documentation is now available in nine languages including English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese. Mathcad includes fifteen languages and dialects for its spell check choices under the Preferences dialog.
•Unicode: Mathcad now provides support for Unicode character sets across the application. You can now enter non-ASCII characters such as special mathematical symbols and characters from Asian, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic and other languages into variables, plot titles, trace labels. You can also enter these character into dialogs such as the Search dialog. All discipline-correct notation can be entered in any area of a worksheet.
•Unicode support for Asian operating systems: Consistency of editing on Asian systems has vastly improved.
•Fidelity of display: The trueness of the display now works for any operating system for easy worldwide use and worksheet sharing across systems.
Usability Features
•New visual worksheet comparison: You can now compare revisions of worksheets or two different XMCD worksheets. The tool will show math and text elements that have been added, deleted, or changed with different colored highlights. It will even display differing results due to tolerance settings or algorithms between versions of Mathcad.
•2D graph enhancements: The Result Format tab has been added to the 2D graph Format dialog so that you can provide greater precision on your axes and grids for 2D graphs.
•New negative radii support in polar plots: Negative radii are now allowed and considered as phase shifts in angles.
•File size reduction: Images can be stored as JPEGs and stored with a lower quality, reducing the size of the Mathcad file. This option is available as a new tab in the Properties dialog under the File menu.
Highlights of the Mathcad 14 Release / 5
•Search and replace: You can now search and replace for text and math elements in collapsed areas.
New and Improved Functions
•ODE solvers: Mathcad 14 adds three new functions for solving ordinary differential equations. Adams is designed to solve non-stiff systems. BDF uses backward differentiation formulas for solving stiff systems. AdamsBDF, a hybrid solver, dynamically detects whether a system is stiff or not and calls Adams or BDF accordingly. Radau now has three optional arguments.
•odesolve’s default solver has changed from Fixed to Adams/BDF, providing more accurate results.
•Radau now had three new optional arguments.
•Statespace: A new statespace function allows you to describe linear, first-order ordinary differential equations in matrix format.
•New Jacob function: A new Jacobian function, Jacob, computes the Jacobian of a vector function of multiple parameters producing a matrix of expressions.
•Bessel functions: New derivative Airy and scaled derivative Airy functions, DAi, DBi, DAI.sc, and DBi.sc are faster and more precise than taking the first derivatives of Airy functions.
Math Enhancements
•Definition and evaluation in the same statement: Expressions such as
x := 1cm + 2ft = 0.934m can be evaluated on the same line and bind to the result.
•New Gradient operator: A new gradient operator on the Calculus toolbar takes partial derivatives over a function of multiple parameters and packs them into a vector.
•Improvements to explicit calculation: Math expressions and equations can be presented in a more standards-compliant manner.
New Symbolics
•More detailed results: Keyword solve and other symbolic operators now return more detailed results. New modifiers such as fully and all give complete solutions.
•New symbolic keywords: The new keywords combine, rewrite, confrac, numer, and denom extend Mathcad’s symbolic capabilities. Read the New Features section of the online Tutorials to see live demonstrations of their capabilities.
•New symbolic functions: Numer, Denom, IsInteger, IsPrime, and IsRational return information about an expression or number that can be used in other functions.
•New modifiers: Nine new modifiers are added in Mathcad 14. All, degree, domain, exp, fully, ln, using, raw, and sincos allow you to modify various keywords. The New Features section in the online Tutorials provides live examples and Help provides a chart of which keywords work with which modifiers.