Mathcad 6 Plus Professional

With Mathcad PLUS 6.0, you get a new set of built-in procedural operators you can use to build your own functional programs right in your Mathcad worksheet. Just click on the operators to define local variables, loops, branches, nested data structures, and recursive functions. And in practically no time, you'll be creating programs that operate on scalars, vectors, matrices, and more.

These operators are not only integrated into Mathcad's user interface, but they're also "live." Change any data, variable, or function on which they depend, and the result is automatically recalculated. And they use real math notation. What's more, because they're visual, you can instantly see the effect of looping and branching. They can also include or be part of any Mathcad expression. And they can depend on the result of any prior computation -- numeric or symbolic.

With Mathcad PLUS 6.0, you can also define your own notation by creating operators with arguments that compute. Just connect the math symbols from any Windows font to your own Mathcad functions. Then, for example, you can build standard logic operators or operators for convolution, function composition, or finding the derivative at a point.

Statistics are important to just about everyone who works with technical calculations. And with Mathcad PLUS 6.0, you'll be able to perform hypothesis testing and build models with probabilistic components. Mathcad PLUS 6.0 includes a set of 16 of the most common statistical distributions, including chi-square, F, t, uniform, normal, binomial, Poisson, beta, Cauchy, exponential, gamma, geometric, log-normal, logistic, negative binomial, and Weibull. A regression function has been added for polynomial curve and surface fitting, while the existing linear regression has been extended to perform multivariate linear regression. And four new data smoothing functions--median smooth, Loess, supsmooth and ksmooth--have been added for advanced data analysis.

With the new visualization tools in Mathcad PLUS 6.0, you'll be able to look at your work in some helpful new ways. Three new graph types have been added: vector, 3-D bar, and 3-D scatter plots. Backplanes and new axis options are now available for 3-D graphs. You can also use the new animation capabilities to bring your work to life, animating graphs, numerical results, and images. This means you can view systems over time or as any other variable changes. And you can export animations as standard Windows AVI files. What's more, you can import bitmap images into your worksheets as matrices and manipulate them with all of Mathcad's functionality.

Graphs are also easier to create and format. There's even an updated graphics dialog box that gives you true interactive graphics capabilities. Want to change a graph from 3-D scatter to contour? Just change the graph type and hit the Apply button. And because the dialog box remains on screen, it's easy to modify your graph again and again until you find the best way to analyze your data and present your solutions.

Mathcad PLUS 6.0 lets you put "live" equations right into text areas. You can also highlight text in color to bring attention to key points. Justify and center text for a more effective presentation. And for full word processing capabilities, you can export your complete Mathcad worksheets to Microsoft Word.

New QuickSheets give you lots of shortcuts that help you learn new features in just a few quick steps. They remind you how to use features you've forgotten about. They offer shortcuts in analyses you use often. They're called QuickSheets, and they're one of the most useful new tools built into Mathcad PLUS 6.0.

Let's say you want to use the new polynomial regression function. There's a QuickSheet to show you how. Just change a few parameters, copy the QuickSheet into your own worksheet, and you're done. Or maybe you need help creating an x-y plot. There's another QuickSheet for that. In all, Mathcad has over 100 QuickSheets, and they're just a mouse click away, meaning less time leafing through the user's manual and more time solving problems.

In addition to the QuickSheets, there are new online help Tooltips that appear when you move the cursor over a button. New toolbars you can move around on screen can customize the look of your Mathcad environment. A new 3-D look and feel make this the most usable Mathcad ever.

To collaborate with clients, colleagues, and associates, just click on the palette and you can transmit your Mathcad worksheets and analyses across most major e-mail systems -- including Microsoft Mail and cc:Mail.

You can link directly to the World Wide Web to find Mathcad worksheets that are relevant to just about any problem you're working on. This means you have access to analyses performed not just by people within your company, but by colleagues in other organizations, including top universities. And it's all in real math notation.

Using Mathcad PLUS 6.0, you can now create documents with hyperlinks to other documents. What's more, links between Mathcad worksheets can point to other Mathcad worksheets stored locally in a Web server. Just double-click on the link, and Mathcad will take you to the linked worksheet--wherever it is.

There's just one barrier that has been added: To improve both security and quality control, MathSoft enabled you to create locked sections in Mathcad PLUS 6.0 with optional passwords. The locks display a date and time stamp so you can know at a glance when the section was last reviewed. That means you can share critical documents with others in your organization and feel confident that key equations are unchangeable.