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.

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MathSoft Engineering & Education, Inc. Knightway House, Park Street, Bagshot, Surrey, GU19 5AQ, UK
Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] www.mathsoft.com

MathSoft Engineering & Education, Inc. 101 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1521
Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] www.mathsoft.com