Mathematica Imports Mathcad Documents
Wolfram Research Targets Dissatisfied Mathcad Users
Wolfram Research, Inc. has announced the immediate availability of
software that converts Mathcad worksheets into Mathematica
notebooks. Mathcad, a mathematical calculator, is the primary product of
MathSoft, Inc.
The development effort was prompted by an increasing number of
inquiries from dissatisfied Mathcad customers wishing to move to
Mathematica. "This has been a constant request from people who
have hit the limits of Mathcad capabilities," explains Barbara
McConnell, Sales Manager of North America at Wolfram Research. "Mathcad
users tell us how they've run out of steam with it and know that
Mathematica can carry them forward. The converter now makes this
easy because they won't need to re-create their previous work to take
advantage of Mathematica's additional power."
Through a strategy of broad functionality and high quality,
Mathematica has dominated the mid- to high-end technical computing
market throughout the nineties, while Mathcad has primarily been popular
among occasional technical users or those addressing simpler
computational tasks.
"While Mathcad has never had the accuracy, speed, and nontrivial
problem-solving capabilities of Mathematica, many perceived its
strength to be its ease of use," explains Conrad Wolfram, Director of
Strategic and International Business Development. "The release of
Mathematica 3 deprived Mathcad of any ease-of-use advantage. We
believe the conversion software will be welcomed by Mathcad users
worried they are locked into a long-term cycle of minor tweaks and
upgrades. We're going to make quite sure that Mathcad users know about
it and that it's free."
The converter will allow documents to be opened and edited in
Mathematica to take advantage of Mathematica's broader
functionality and more-accurate computations. In many cases, the
computations can be performed unchanged in Mathematica. The
converter will work for all versions of Mathematica 3 or later.
It can be downloaded
free of charge.
For more information about converting Mathcad worksheets into
Mathematica notebooks, contact Jon McLoone, Wolfram Research
Europe Ltd., by telephone at +44-(0)1993-883400 or by email at jonm@wolfram.com.
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