Note also that the 'original' Mathcad is dead-ended, i.e., PTC will not be supporting any more updates or releases.ĭepending on which specific version of Mathcad you have, the symbolic engine may be different.

Churchill RE: What is the main differences between Mathcad prime and Mathcad IRstuff (Aerospace) 28 Jan 15 23:46 'Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?' Good luck with learning and using Mathcad. The fastest way to see all of my documents is to jump to my page at. Most of my documents are under Civil Engineering, but there are three that I also posted under Mechanical Engineering (Lusk_Darcy Friction Factors_v2.zip, Lusk_Natural Gas Distribution Systems & Service Connections (rev3).zip, and Lusk_Feet Inches & Fractions Calculations.zip). ) to see the various categories of documents. Also, I have posted a bunch of Prime 3.0 worksheets on the PTC Mathcad website and at least three are of interest to mechanical engineers. The best book (maybe the only book) on Mathcad Prime 3.0 is Brent Maxfield's 'Essential PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0'. Prime also has a generally better interface (although I sure wish I could park tool palettes on my screen to save repeated clicks on the ribbon) and produces slightly better looking documents. The best tool I gained in making the jump is programming, which Mathcad 8.0 Standard did not do. Prime 3.0 does more than my old Mathcad 8.0 Standard, which was sufficient for most of the calculations I need do as a civil engineer. Prime has not yet caught up to the depth and breadth of Mathcad 15.0, and probably won't until at least Prime 5.0, but for me it doesn't matter. Prime 3.0 is the the first version I consider to the truly useful, even though the MC15 fans still snub their noses at Prime.

I had demo'ed Prime 2.0 earlier that year, but it didn't seem finished, hence the wait.

After dealing with several freeze or crash episodes per day for about two weeks, I resolved to upgrade to Mathcad Prime as soon as Prime 3.0 was released (which was about 3 months after I finished the project calcs). The tipping point was a project I did in 2013 for which I created about 100 pages worth of Mathcad calcs in documents ranging from 4 to 10 pages. It was slightly slower than it had been under 32-bit Windows Vista (on a slower computer, no less) and had a tendency to freeze or even crash the computer during a long session. I have used the file converter to successfully convert MC8 files to Prime 3.0 format.īTW, the main reason I upgraded is that MC8 was not very happy running under 64-bit Windows 7, even in compatibility mode. This is a good thing because you need MC15 to use the MC-to-Prime file converter. This means that I also jumped to Mathcad 15.0 because MC15 is included free with Prime (it's a separate download, but it uses the same licensing file). I jumped from Mathcad 8.0 Standard (c.1998) to Mathcad Prime 3.0 a little over a year ago.

Mathcad 15.0 student edition download