mathcad excel

Mathcad or Excel?Don't ditch your spreadsheet: but if you want an effective way to progress, documentand 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 ofMathcad - is a great aid to productivity. The Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application is very capable and flexible, and is widely used by engineersand just about everyone else who needs to perform calculations and handle data.

Excel does have its limitations, however. There are surely timeswhen you miss being able to write out your formulae in propermaths notation - equations are usually more intuitive than aspreadsheet's nested arguments. Excel's cell structure can oftenbe a problem too - it's not easy to check formulae and verifydata when they're hidden away in cells.

That's just two of the reasons why so many engineers useMathcad to supplement, and for many tasks to replace, thespreadsheets. While it can handle all the calculation andgraphing functions - and more - that Excel does, its interfaceis like a word processor's. You start with a blank page, andplace 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 wordprocessor, because you can define regions and drag them anywhere on thepage. You can format text fonts and maths symbols, add images, useheaders and footers - you can even create style sheets to match yourcorporate standards or publication guidelines. And you can hide and lockaway (behind robust, encrypted passwords) any information you don't wantothers to see. As well as protecting your intellectual property, that also meansyou can, as with a spreadsheet, present only summary information and results.

Mathcad works alongside Excel: you can embed spreadsheets into yourMathcad worksheet, or Mathcad routines or whole worksheets into yourspreadsheet cells, and use Mathcad to calculate and drive spreadsheet variables.Mathcad is also compatible with most other popular engineering applicationsrunning under Windows, including MATLAB, AutoCAD, Visio, Axum andSmartSketch. And it supports analogue I/O cards from MeasurementComputing and National Instruments too, so you can even sample live data.

So while we certainly don't suggest you stop using spreadsheets, we do thinkyou should consider the advantagesof adding Mathcad to your desktop.When you don't want to be restrictedto a rigid tabular format; when youwant to see your calculations andworkings clearly in a form that's easyto check and validate; when youwant to combine your calculationswith other text and visualinformation, and document yourwork as you go: that's when you'llappreciate the Mathcad advantage.

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