When you evaluate expressions symbolically, functions and variables that you defined in the worksheet are used to reduce expressions where appropriate. You can use symbolic evaluation to evaluate expressions containing operators, including integrals, derivatives, matrix operations, most matrix functions, summations, and products. When you evaluate arithmetic expressions symbolically, results are returned in terms of the symbols or variables in the original expression.

If an arithmetic expression does not contain any decimal numbers, the symbolic evaluation operator returns results in symbolic form. For example, PTC Mathcad returns the sum of common fractions as a fraction.

However, if the expression does contain a decimal number, PTC Mathcad returns a decimal result.

PTC Mathcad calculates this result using symbolic floating-point evaluation, which returns results of variable precision.

PTC Mathcad evaluates radical expressions by extracting roots as far as possible. If the result is not a rational number, PTC Mathcad returns the answer in terms of the radical sign.

You can use the functions numer and denom to return the numerator or denominator of a symbolic fraction. For example,

Some symbolic evaluations return large results that may span several page widths, but PTC Mathcad truncates the result in an elegant manner that allows the user to see the full result, if needed. Chained symbolic regions, regions with a symbolic evaluation followed by a numeric evaluation and regions with a definition followed by a symbolic evaluation will all undergo such truncation if their content is too large.