I have not used the new Mathcad much myself, but I do know they rearranged all the key function a bit so some of the hotkeys don't work as they always did. I think symbolic solve is a feature they added in prime 2.0 or 3.0. Not 100% sure though.

I noticed on their site this: http://www.ptc.com/product/mathcad/compare

so the free trial version cannot do symbolics after 30 days.

It's getting better, but it probably won't be until MP5 before it gets back to the same functionality of M13. Graphing is somewhat nicer. I still use M15 for my stuff, mainly because it can read most versions of Mathcad, besides MPn, and MPn can only read MPn; which is a PITA

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Of course I can. I can do anything. I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

"It's getting better, but it probably won't be until MP5 before it gets back to the same functionality of M13." :( This is sad. I will stick to my Mathcad 13 and Mathematica for now.
Thanks guys.

Peter Nachtwey
Delta Computer Systems
http://www.deltamotion.com

Yeah, that's a PITA, but I'm guessing that they were trying to avoid the debacle that was M12. But, that only really took two revisions to get back to full capability, aside from the symbolic solver.

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Of course I can. I can do anything. I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

I must admit I upgraded to V14 for one reason.

V13
a = 2 * 4
a = 8

V14
a = 2 * 4 = 8

The ability to have that all on the one line. Saying that, I did run into problems with V14 where it couldn't solve things that V13 found a doddle.

I am still making do with Mathcad 13.
a=2*4=8 is just a fluff feature. It may look nice but it doesn't help me solve my problems.
The bad thing is that I can participate any more because I can't read posted files in new format.

At this time I am trying to solve problems that I couldn't solve with Mathcad 13 with Mathematica. There is a lot that Mathcad can't do but I doubt that most would run into these limitations.

Peter Nachtwey
Delta Computer Systems
http://www.deltamotion.com

That "fluff feature" is why I went to 14 and have regretted it ever since. The second "=" changes the way that auto calc works so if you change something, you answers don't seem to change sometimes (I really hate "sometimes"). Go into the equation and change something and it recalcs. Click on it and hit F9 and it usually recalcs (but not nearly always). Stick with V13, wish I had.

I use MathCad 14 every day of my life and after the V12 I evaluated everything else on the market and nothing felt right (I'd been using MathCad for so long that their stupid key combinations feel natural). I keep getting adds for the new Mathmatica (I used a very early version in grad school and really hated it) and it is looking better every release, but is is good enough yet? I don't know, but I do know that I am really reluctant to go to the new program from PTC.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. —Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

You guys don't know how much this irk me. Mathcad is one of the few math packages that start arrays and indexing with 0. Most others start with 1 and I don't like that. I want to have my cake and eat it too. Meanwhile I still use Mathcad 13 but I am trying to get a handle on Mathematica at the same time.
I wish PTC would get its symbolic solver working. After playing with the two math packages I find the big difference in the solver is that Mathcad will simply try to get an answer and simply stop there. Mathematica will recursively look at the solution and try to optimize the answer. Sometimes the difference in results is amazing. Other times, not so much. Mathcad of yields answers that stretch across many pages and it is too hard to work with the answer.

Both math packages FAIL big time in 1 case. Often the answer has square root and cube root terms that are repeated many time in parts of the solution. There should be a way where one can easily set these square and cube root terms to a temporary variable and then replace all the terms this temporary variable represent to the temporary variable. This would drastically reduce the size of the solutions.

Also, I am running Mathematica on a WIN8.1 computer with 16MB of memory. I can see my Mathcad 13 didn't have much of a chance with only 3MB on WIN XP.
Get at least 16MB.

Peter Nachtwey
Delta Computer Systems
http://www.deltamotion.com

I've always regarded getting the best from the symbolic processor as a rather fearsome puzzle.

In your case i'd substitute a variable name for the repeated roots.

I've actually got some quite decent results even for long equations by attacking it piece by piece, much as one would by hand.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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It is hard to select anything when the solution stretches over 10 pages. The computer screen doesn't update at a usable rate
I do some pretty heavy math.

Peter Nachtwey
Delta Computer Systems
http://www.deltamotion.com