Many use Microsoft Excel for their engineering calculations out of convenience—but Excel isn’t the best tool for the job. Explore the benefits of a dedicated calculation software to increase efficiency, even when using your existing Excel spreadsheets.
Excel was originally designed for tabulating basic accounting and finance figures and calculations using rows and columns. Since then, it has evolved over time to add math functions, but stayed true to its original grid format.
Excel is a convenient choice, but is it the right choice for engineers?
This is what typical engineering math may look like in Excel. Your hopes of communicating engineering knowledge are easily lost in the chaos of cell references and parentheses. Spreadsheet math is error-prone, and it’s very difficult to check and validate your work. Excel also doesn’t have engineering units, so readers don’t even know what this formula is for.
PTC Mathcad was designed to meet the needs of engineers. This is the same sample equation as what’s in Excel, but Mathcad’s natural math notation represents it like it’s right from a math textbook. Any engineer can look at and validate the formula. Plus, Mathcad keeps track of units, which lets you know that this is a formula for mechanical energy.
Choose Mathcad… because Excel just can’t compete.
Mathcad gives engineers an application purposely built for engineering math. It visually represents math in an intuitive way, making it easy to define, understand, and manipulate engineering calculations with the whiteboard-like user interface.
If you’re convinced that you should use Mathcad for your engineering over Excel, that doesn’t mean you have to trash your Excel spreadsheets and convert them into Mathcad. You can use the two programs together and leverage their respective strengths—Excel’s data storage, and Mathcad’s calculations and documentation—because they are tightly integrated and interoperable. Mathcad can read Excel data and will automatically update if the spreadsheet changes. Mathcad can also write back into Excel spreadsheets.
You can try our PTC Mathcad trial for free for 30 days and check out the Excel integration for yourself. It’s easy to get going!
