Blockpad compared to Mathcad

Blockpad offers all of the important parts of Mathcad for engineering, plus more features that are built for practical engineering work. Whether you're a long time Mathcad user exploring other options or you're checking it out for the first time because you find it's features attractive, read on to learn about what Blockpad can do.

The important parts of Mathcad

Mathcad has a core set of tools that make it work well for engineering. Blockpad has all of those tools too.

Auto-updating math

Just like Mathcad (and spreadsheets for that matter), changes in Blockpad automatically propagate throughout the whole document.

We take it for granted, but it's an important point.

Named values

Equations in Blockpad can be easily named at the point they are defined, then those names can be used in further equations.

This part of the program is basic, but crucial. Easily naming values makes readable equations possible, and readable equations are at the core of creating clear, understandable calculations.

Math notation

Blockpad equations are written a lot like Excel formulas, but when those formulas are used in the document, they are shown in readable math notation.

With equations in math notation, they are much more readable to human eyes, so you can catch errors much more easily. There's also a visual editor to make editing these equations is easy too.

Units intelligence

Manually taking care of unit conversions in every calculation is burdensome and mistake prone, so it makes sense that this is a popular Mathcad feature.

That's why units intelligence is available in Blockpad too, so you can let the computer handle all of the minutia of conversion factors while you focus on the bigger picture.

Units intelligence has further benefits too - it encourages good unit book keeping by default and it helps to catch other errors in an equation, like forgetting to square a value.

Math

Blockpad includes all of the math capabilities that you need for engineering tasks at a practical level. That is to say, it has the same capabilities as conventional spreadsheets like Excel, with some extra capabilities around solvers, arrays, custom functions, and matrices.

To be fully transparent, Blockpad does not include some higher level math like partial differential equations or Fourier transforms, so if that is important for your work, Mathcad might still be the better bet.

Word processing

Blockpad's primary environment, "Reports", is essentially a word processor, with a secondary option to have a notebook-like interface.

Blockpad has all of the same text editing that Mathcad does in these reports, and most people find it even more natural for writing, since it's like other familiar writing tools.

More feature parity

Besides the core features, Blockpad also includes a lot of other things found in Mathcad that help make your documents even better.

Blockpad has more practical features

Blockpad also features a lot of capabilities that you can't find in Mathcad. These features were built around practical needs for engineers creating calc documents.

Show steps

Blockpad includes a "Show Steps" option for equations that shows the equation with the actual number values plugged in. This is great for illustrating what math the program is doing and making the calculations more reviewable.

Native spreadsheets and tables

Spreadsheets provide an intuitive and robust method for handling data at the scale required for engineering calculations. That's why at Blockpad we built fully functional spreadsheets and tables (mini-spreadsheets) directly into the program.

The tables in Blockpad are not an integration with a separate program, they are just as much part of Blockpad as the equations. Because of this, features like units intelligence are possible in spreadsheets too.

Also, with tables in the document, you can use the values in the tables for equations in the document, and vice versa. This works great for things like lookup values.

Word processing and formatting tools

Since Blockpad works like a word processor, this enables convenient word processing tools like page breaks, tab stops, and consistent styling

Auto generated table of contents

When you use headings in a Blockpad file, you can create an automatically generated table of contents based on those headings and where they are in the file.

This table of contents works as hyperlinks to those parts in the document too, and you can also style the table of contents to match the rest of your file.

Comments

Blockpad has spreadsheet-style comments that appear when you click on them, but don't show when you print the document.

Frames and sections to organize documents

Calculation documents can get long with many different kinds of calculations and with repeated versions of the same calculation.

Blockpad has tools to manage this length and complexity by giving you different containers to put the parts of a calculation in.

Frames

A lot like sheets in conventional spreadsheets, Blockpad has frames that are all located in the same file, but unlike spreadsheets, these frames can be more than just one thing. They can be reports (the word processor environment), actual spreadsheets, drawings, or notebooks.

With frames, you can put fundamentally different parts of your calculation file in different frames to organize them better, but these different frames can still interact with each other in equations. For example, you could create a meta-information report frame that contains all of the general information on a project, and this information is kept in a different place in the file than the main calculations. You can also keep entire spreadsheets of data in a file and reference them in the main calculations as needed.

Sections

Sections are like wrappers that you can put around groups of equations. This keeps them together and somewhat separated from everything else.

You can reference equations in a section from outside of that section using the section name. This enables you to repeat the same calculation multiple times with the same name, but still have all of those values accessible from anywhere in the document.

Blocks - custom calculation modules in the doc

Engineering often has a lot of repeated calculations. To make these more consistent and useable in a document, Blockpad has blocks, which are essentially custom calculation modules that you can use inside of a document.

When you make a block definition, you set what inputs are changeable when you use those blocks later. And once you've made a block definition, you can re-use it as a block inside of files again and again as needed.

Once in the doc, you can reference other values in the file to define the inputs for a block, and then you can reference the outputs from the block in equations in the doc too. This enables linking from all of your equations to your calculation modules, and vice versa, so you can have one cohesive document.

Easier for Excel users to get started

A lot of Excel users like the idea of Mathcad, but they don't ever make the switch for any number of reasons. Blockpad makes it easier for them to make that switch.

There's a lot that's familiar in Blockpad - click-to-reference values, equations as formulas, and of course, having actual spreadsheets available. Because of this, Excel users find using Blockpad more familiar than Mathcad so they can get started more quickly.

More affordable

At Blockpad, our goal is to make high-quality tools available to engineers throughout the world. Part of that mission is keeping our pricing reasonable so that more engineers can have access.

At the time of writing this, Mathcad is over 4x the cost of Blockpad for groups - check out our pricing page and see how things compare.

The engineering software of the future

Blockpad is built for engineers by engineers, and we're excited to make better and better tools for engineers doing real work throughout the world.

Start a free trial today