Mathcad gains enterprise functionality

Mathcad 11 is the latest version of the industry-standard solution for applying mathematics to engineering, science and other technical operations.

Mathcad 11 is the latest version of the industry-standard solution for applying mathematics to engineering, science and other technical operations.

Available for the first time in single-user and enterprise editions, Mathcad 11 delivers not only the desktop calculation power engineers demand, but also organisational benefits that bring an increased return on investment and improved efficiency to the engineering process.

"Engineering calculations represent a large investment of both time and money that is not fully delivering on its potential", said Chris Randles, CEO of Mathsoft Engineering and Education (Cambridge, Massachusetts), the developer of Mathcad.

"Spreadsheets and calculators fail to expose and capture the design rationale that goes into calculations, limiting a company's ability to manage, improve and re-use one of its most highly leveraged assets: engineering expertise".

Mathcad is the industry-standard calculation package for technical professionals and the technical academic community, with well over 1.5 million users worldwide.

With Mathcad 11, the developers have built on its strengths in calculation power and documentation and added core application improvements for single users.

Many of them, including multiple-level undo/redo, better handling of mixed data sets and the ability to save worksheets in rich text format have been high on many users' wish lists.

In addition, through consultation with its broad customer base, Mathsoft has identified an organisational need for centralised management of the essential calculations that drive engineering enterprises.

As a result, the Enterprise Edition of Mathcad includes calculation management support that, for the first time, makes its possible to systematically capture, share and manage calculation-based information throughout the entire enterprise.

The Mathcad 11 Enterprise edition provides a platform for creating, documenting and managing calculations, enabling organisations to harness the power of engineering calculations through knowledge capture and re-use.

Unlike a spreadsheet, where it's difficult to see how a result was derived, Mathcad allows users, their colleagues and managers to see, track and verify the whole calculation process.

Unlike programming tools (and the traditional pocket calculator or back-of-the-envelope jottings), Mathcad preserves a complete record of this process, and the assumptions behind the calculations.

This record is then available for review and the knowledge is retained.

Mathcad Enterprise integrates with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, enabling engineering organisations to manage calculations and methods (including critical design parameters) through new, centralised repository capabilities.

Other new features, including networked accessibility, check-in/check-out, version management and access control, give users powerful new capabilities for finding, updating, approving and re-using Mathcad calculations and designs, as well as for sharing procedures and data.

Also designed to serve the needs of individual engineers and scientists, Mathcad 11 is a critical calculation tool that delivers increased productivity, both online and offline.

With this latest version of Mathcad, individual users receive the most complete calculation package that will be at the centre of their technical desktop.

Mathcad 11 features new mathematical functionality and improved data handling capabilities to create a high-powered calculation tool with the broadest application of any engineering package.

It also enables users to easily integrate calculations with other frequently used desktop applications.

Mathcad 11's enhanced equation, text and region editing and the accessibility of its features make it a highly usable tool for engineers and scientists: navigation is faster and easier; new menu options, technical resources and documentation, make Mathcad even more intuitive to use and Mathcad resources and references even easier to locate.

A major strength of Mathcad is its self-documenting nature.

Communicating and sharing Mathcad documents is made easier by the new ability to save worksheets in the familiar rich text format (RTF).

New conversion features enable users to save their work in a variety of Mathcad formats (Mathcad 6, 7, 8, 2000, 2001 and 2001i), so they can share their work with colleagues, regardless of their current version of the software, and also access legacy files from earlier Mathcad designs.

This latest version also features bidirectional HTML/MathML support, which makes the sharing of technical documents on the Web or corporate intranet even easier.

It allows users to deploy Mathcad worksheets to non-Mathcad users and interact with computations via a Web browser without needing additional plug-ins.

Users also receive more web formatting options through an HTML output layout that delivers customised web pages with headers/footers, navigation links and images, a process made even easier by a new web wizard for step-by-step guidance on publishing Mathcad documents online.

Mathcad 11 is supplied and supported in the UK, Ireland, Denmark and Norway by Adept Scientific.

(This was Engineeringtalk's Top Story on 19 November 2002).

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