Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Domains

Domain: mathcad.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to mathcad.com.

Comments · 6

  1. Re:The wrong path by Knacklappen · · Score: 2 · on Excel Clone for Linux Now in Beta
    1. Excel is an extremely poor tool for doing anything other than basic graphs and calculations. For engineering purposes, it's near useless.
    Don't know what kind of engineer you are but in the Real World (TM) you will find lots of engineers doing some quick & dirty calculations in Excel.

    Sure, you could use Matlab or Mathematica or Maple but have you checked the price of these programs? I managed to get us some licenses of MathCad (and make a point of using them as much as possible) but even this is not for free. Well, Octave is, even free as in beer-drunken speech, but the point I want to make is that for a user whos Windows-based PC came with MS Office installed, Excel is the easiest way. And in combination with SQL and VBA it's often powerful enough...

    As long as you don't require graphs with more than 32768 items in one data series or more than 65536 rows on your spread sheet. But for smaller data series (say up to 10000 rows, with 20 columns) Excel is pretty OK.

    The one thing I hate about Excel is that it is too easy to just put together some quick & dirty calculations. Regardless with what intention I start, over time my Excel sheets always grow beyond what they intially where planned for. And then it's getting ugly, becuase after some time you lose control over the relationships of the cells and equations. Sure, there are some tools for that, but not enough.
    And VBA is great, too, but when you just make a print-out for a colleague, you only get the spread sheet, not the connections between the cells and not the VBA-routines in the background. I now try to make up for all my past Excel-crimes by step-wise converting everything important to MathCad. Because there (as in Mathematica or Maple) a print-out shows all the underlying equations and algorithms in a natural and easy-to-understand way.

    So, to return to where I started: Excel is not "near-useless for engineering purposes". I consider myself a decent engineer and have done serious work in Excel, and I have some Excel-addicted colleagues, who I really admire (and sometimes envy) for their work.
  2. Re:The wrong path by Knacklappen · · Score: 2 · on Excel Clone for Linux Now in Beta
    1. Excel is an extremely poor tool for doing anything other than basic graphs and calculations. For engineering purposes, it's near useless.
    Don't know what kind of engineer you are but in the Real World (TM) you will find lots of engineers doing some quick & dirty calculations in Excel.

    Sure, you could use Matlab or Mathematica or Maple but have you checked the price of these programs? I managed to get us some licenses of MathCad (and make a point of using them as much as possible) but even this is not for free. Well, Octave is, even free as in beer-drunken speech, but the point I want to make is that for a user whos Windows-based PC came with MS Office installed, Excel is the easiest way. And in combination with SQL and VBA it's often powerful enough...

    As long as you don't require graphs with more than 32768 items in one data series or more than 65536 rows on your spread sheet. But for smaller data series (say up to 10000 rows, with 20 columns) Excel is pretty OK.

    The one thing I hate about Excel is that it is too easy to just put together some quick & dirty calculations. Regardless with what intention I start, over time my Excel sheets always grow beyond what they intially where planned for. And then it's getting ugly, becuase after some time you lose control over the relationships of the cells and equations. Sure, there are some tools for that, but not enough.
    And VBA is great, too, but when you just make a print-out for a colleague, you only get the spread sheet, not the connections between the cells and not the VBA-routines in the background. I now try to make up for all my past Excel-crimes by step-wise converting everything important to MathCad. Because there (as in Mathematica or Maple) a print-out shows all the underlying equations and algorithms in a natural and easy-to-understand way.

    So, to return to where I started: Excel is not "near-useless for engineering purposes". I consider myself a decent engineer and have done serious work in Excel, and I have some Excel-addicted colleagues, who I really admire (and sometimes envy) for their work.
  3. Re:Mathematics not universal? by janeil · · Score: 1 · on The Golden Ratio
    I feel your pain. Phi is such a cool constant, and the discussion has kind of strayed.

    However, in the field of education the idea of invention or discovery is pretty hot and heavy, I'm not up on the jargon, perhaps someone else could share the points/counterpoints.

    Also, it is true that much of mathematics is "made up" in the sense that there can be exploration within a system of axioms. But fields like planar and spherical trigonometry, the inverse-square relationship, number theory, probability, these things just are not human invention, divorced from the universe we inhabit.

  4. MathCad? by Joe+Jordan · · Score: 3, Insightful · on Use of Math Languages and Packages in Research?

    Now, I'm only in college, but while we did dabble a bit in Maple and a few others that you mentioned, the only Math software package I've used extensively is MathCad. I've found it to be the most user friendly of the bunch, and they have a new version out: MathCad.com

  5. MathCad by sysadmn · · Score: 3 · on Spreadsheets for Scientific Computing?

    Consider MathCad. Back when I was doing control theory classes, the interface seemed much more intuitive. You 'wrote' a page of equations, plots, etc. and they were solved automatically. You could even write live reports. It was great for lab and homework writeups. The screenshots don't do it justice. Sadly it is not free, and is windows only.

  6. Palm + Folding keyboard by segfaultdot · · Score: 1 · on PDAs as a College Notebook?

    I used this combo for my C Programming class. It worked great, and other students were begging me for code snippets that i had typed. Some of my programming assignments were as simple as copying the code from jPilot (Linux Palm frontend) into gVim and compiling. The only thing is make sure you have enough desk space for the folding keyboard. Once, i moved the folding keyboard so that the front was off the desk. The folding stand for the palm collapsed, and the palm fell onto the floor. I had to send it in to Palm to be fixed.

    I don't know what to say about the math notation. suff like "z=sin(x^y!/3)" and junk like that (i'm sure what you need to take notes of would be much more advanced) isn't very convenient.

    If you want to go the slim laptop or tablet route, MathCAD might just be right up your alley. It's basically a mathematical word processor. It's no Mathematica, but it would probably work. The student price is $120. That's if you want to run Windows on a laptop or (maybe?) web pad. If you you're a Linux guy (like myself) then i'm not sure. You might try lyx like the other person suggested (i've never used it). I have used MathCAD, and it was really nice, although I was just using it for Calculus. I used it a long time ago, and i don't know how good or bad the program or the company is now. But it did a great job for me back when.