Mathcad Tool Bars and Palettes

Mathcad Tool Bars and Palettes

Features of the Mathcad Window

Before you move on to learning more about Mathcad's features and especially about building math and text in your own Mathcad worksheets, take a moment to look at the Mathcad application window in front of you.

The Main Menu

Here is your gateway to math, graphics, and symbolic functions and provides commands that handle the details of editing and managing your worksheets. Click on the Math and the Symbolics menus to see the array of computational functionality available to you in this product.

Access to any Mathcad Electronic Books you may have installed is now available through the Help menu.

The Math Palette

Below the main menu is a tear-away bar whose buttons bring up palettes of math operators. If you let your mouse hover over each of the buttons on the bar in turn, you'll see a tool tip telling you what palette each button brings up:

Arithmetic Palette

Graph Palette

Vector and Matrix Palette

Evaluation Pallete

Calculus Palette

Evaluation and Boolean Palette

Programming Palette

Greek Symbol Palette

Symbolic Keyword Palette

Click on one of these buttons in the bar to bring up the associated operator palette. You can then use the operator palettes to insert math symbols right into your Mathcad worksheet.

The Tool Bar

is another tear-away button bar that provides shortcuts for many common tasks, from worksheet opening and file saving to spell checking to bringing up lists of built-in functions and units. Depending on what you're doing in your worksheet, one or more of these buttons may appear grayed out. Tool tips will remind you of the functions of each of the buttons. One useful button is:

Launches the Resource Center, that contains QuickSheets, template Mathcad worksheets that solve many common math tasks, from graphing to data analysis as well as extensive  reference tables, and other useful information.

The Format Bar

This is where you can format your text and math at the click of a button. If the Format Bar is not showing, select Format Bar from the View Menu.

The Resource Center Navigational Controls

appear whenever you have a Mathcad Electronic Book open and give you ways to browse among the sections of the Book and find topics of interest. This Tutorial you are reading is in fact a Mathcad Electronic Book! Just let your mouse hover over each of the navigational buttons at the top of this window to see a tool tip explaining what each one does.

Finally, the message line

at the bottom of the Mathcad window gives you status alerts, tips, keyboard shortcuts, and other helpful information. It also lists the calculation status of your worksheet -- 'auto' here means that the worksheet is in automatic mode, which means Mathcad will automatically recalculate any math expressions if you make edits to your worksheet. You can tell when Mathcad is recalculating because 'WAIT' appears on the message line and the cursor changes to a flashing lightbulb. Other information that appears on the message line is whether you have the Caps Lock or Num Lock key depressed on your keyboard, as well as the page number of the current worksheet.

Step-by-Step Editing Guide

A mathematical expression in Mathcad is a remarkable object: It is both a picture on your screen (or on paper when you print out a worksheet) and a set of instructions for computing something. Mathcad's equation editor is thus a unique blend of word processor and code generator, an efficient way of building expressions that look right and calculate correctly. The next lessons focus on teaching you the basics of entering, building, and editing math expressions, with a few detours to talk about text and graphics in Mathcad worksheets. These are orgainsed as follows

Working with Mathcad Regions

Entering Math and Text

Working with Mathcad Styles and Templates

Defining Variables

Defining Functions

Building Mathematical Expressions

Editing Expressions

Defining Range Variables

Defining Vectors and Matrices

Creating Graphs

Formatting Math and Text

Formatting Results

Using Units

Creating Programs

Solving Systems of Equations

Curve Fitting and Approximation