Introduction

By using Mathcad, organisations become more efficient through being able to re-use their calculation documents on different jobs, and by avoiding many common types of calculation error. This seminar will show you what many of the major NZ engineering companies already know – an investment in Mathcad software and training will repay itself many times over.

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The general purpose and benefits of Mathcad to the users' organisation will be discussed. A demonstration will take most of the seminar time, and will show real documents taken from different disciplines, plus specific features commonly used to enhance calculations and the user's understanding.

Why use Mathcad?

Most engineers use a combination of hand-written calculation pages and spreadsheets to do the numerical part of their designs.

With Mathcad, these two operations are combined – in one document you can put all the descriptive material plus the calculations. Calculations are written in the notation you use when you write them on a piece of paper, and they are immediately evaluated. You no longer have to care about cell references!

Many errors that engineers make come down to incorrect handling of measurement units. Mathcad enables you to specify the units of each number you use, and it then keeps track of the dimensions used in a calculation, and points out erroneous combinations.

The simplicity of a Mathcad document means it is much quicker to write and to debug than a spreadsheet, and the completeness means that it can be accurately audited or re-used for similar calculations. These aspects together lead to significant business cost savings.

However, the benefits of Mathcad don’t end there. Mathcad contains many more engineering functions than Excel. You can use complex numbers in electrical or other calculations. You can even do algebra and calculus. If necessary, you can write complete programs in Mathcad, although usually a simple document is enough.
If you need to process lots of data, Mathcad will read your Excel and other data files.

• Mechanical engineer
• Electrical engineer
• Civil engineer
• Electronic engineer
• Physicist
• Scientist
• Designer
• Engineering manager
• Lecturer

Dr Ray Hoare has degrees in mathematics, physics and chemistry and worked for many years in industrial and environmental science. For more than 15 years he has been helping people to analyse engineering, science and business data, as well as presenting seminars and training people in the use of statistical software.

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About Mathcad

Mathcad is a system for making mathematical documents that read like a page in a textbook, yet give you access to far more computing power than any spreadsheet.

You can do numerical mathematics, symbolic mathematics, solving, calculus, and two- or three-dimensional graphing. A simple-to-use programming language is available when the large number of built-in functions don’t meet your particular need.

You can include dimensional units in calculations, and Mathcad automatically checks for consistency and allows for conversion between unit systems.

By having text, formulas and graphs in a single document in which all aspects of the calculation are visible on the one screen or even a printed document, engineers can be sure that they understand exactly what was intended in the original document, and auditing and re-use is easily done.

Getting started with Mathcad is not difficult, because of the help system, tutorials, and example documents. To really get up to speed quickly you can ask us to provide a customised private training course, or come to a public training course.

For more about Mathcad, click here.

Seminar Length

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