Mathcad Excel.pdf

Mathcad or Excel?

Don't ditch your spreadsheet: but if you want an effective way to progress, document

and communicate engineering projects, you need Mathcad on your desktop too.

Most of us these days have PCs with Microsoft Office pre-installed, and good compatibility with the Office programs - a significant benefit of

Mathcad - is a great aid to productivity. The Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application is very capable and flexible, and is widely used by engineers

and just about everyone else who needs to perform calculations and handle data.

Excel does have its limitations, however. There are surely times

when you miss being able to write out your formulae in proper

maths notation - equations are usually more intuitive than a

spreadsheet's nested arguments. Excel's cell structure can often

be a problem too - it's not easy to check formulae and verify

data when they're hidden away in cells.

That's just two of the reasons why so many engineers use

Mathcad to supplement, and for many tasks to replace, the

spreadsheets. While it can handle all the calculation and

graphing functions - and more - that Excel does, its interface

is like a word processor's. You start with a blank page, and

place your equations (in real maths notation), text,

annotations, graphs, tables and drawings wherever you like.

In that way, Mathcad is more like a desktop publishing program than a word

processor, because you can define regions and drag them anywhere on the

page. You can format text fonts and maths symbols, add images, use

headers and footers - you can even create style sheets to match your

corporate standards or publication guidelines. And you can hide and lock

away (behind robust, encrypted passwords) any information you don't want

others to see. As well as protecting your intellectual property, that also means

you can, as with a spreadsheet, present only summary information and results.

Mathcad works alongside Excel: you can embed spreadsheets into your

Mathcad worksheet, or Mathcad routines or whole worksheets into your

spreadsheet cells, and use Mathcad to calculate and drive spreadsheet variables.

Mathcad is also compatible with most other popular engineering applications

running under Windows, including MATLAB, AutoCAD, Visio, Axum and

SmartSketch . And it supports analogue I/O cards from Measurement

Computing and National Instruments too, so you can even sample live data.

So while we certainly don't suggest you stop using spreadsheets, we do think

you should consider the advantages

of adding Mathcad to your desktop.

When you don't want to be restricted

to a rigid tabular format; when you

want to see your calculations and

workings clearly in a form that's easy

to check and validate; when you

want to combine your calculations

with other text and visual

information, and document your

work as you go: that's when you'll

appreciate the Mathcad advantage.

MathSoft Engineering & Education, Inc. Knightway House, Park Street, Bagshot, Surrey, GU19 5AQ, UK

Tel: +44 (0) 1276 450850 Fax: +44 (0) 1276 475552 www.mathsoft.com

MathSoft Engineering & Education, Inc. 101 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1521

Tel: 617-444-8000 Fax: 617-444-8001 www.mathsoft.com

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