MaplePrimes - Maplesoft Blog - Posts by Samir Khan

Announcing Maple Flow 2025.2

Samir Khan — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:33:54 Z

We've reached quite a rhythm with Maple Flow - we update frequently, we add lots of improvements and we move fast.

What does this mean for you? It means that the feedback loop between development, the user experience and course correction has a fast time constant.

Without you being loud and vociferous, the feedback loop breaks. So don't be shy - tell us what you want!.

The new 2025.2 update builds on the theme of connectivity with two popular tools - Excel and Python. On top of that, we also have many other features and fixes that you've asked for.

Earlier versions of Maple Flow let you

import and and export Excel data from Excel spreadsheets
run Maple Flow worksheets in Excel with a mouse-driven UI to generate the communication glue

With the 2025.2 update, you can now copy and paste data from Excel into a Flow worksheet.

To be blunt, this is type of cross-application copy-paste behaviour is a no-brainer. It's such a natural workflow.

We've increasignly found that Python is now being used to script the interaction and data flow between different engineering tools. With Maple Flow 2025.2, you can now execute Maple Flow worksheets from a Python script.

From Python, you can change and export any parameters and results defined in the worksheet

This gives me the dopamine hit of watching CPU utilization spike in the Task Manager (hey..I get my kicks where I can)

You can now do your parameter sweeps more quickly by executing the same worksheet in parallel, changing parameters for every run.

This is easy to set up - no special programming is needed.

Print Extents can now be set globally for all sessions, or just for the current session.
Any user-installed fonts used in the worksheet are now respected in the PDF export
Worksheets execute faster
The update includes fixes to many user-reported issues

You can install the Flow 2025.2 update via Help > Check for Updates (or if you're not already in the race, then grab a trial here and take Flow for a spin).

We're not pulling back on this aggresive development velocity, but we need you to point us in the right direction. Let's keep the feedback time constant small!

Your Calculations, Supercharged: Meet Maple Flow 2025

Samir Khan — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 20:41:00 Z

Back in 2017, when the concept of Maple Flow was first proposed at Maplesoft, we developed an aspirational brochure to ignite our creative energy. I still have a printed few copies – here’s one that’s sat behind my monitor.

At that time, the product that did not yet exist was called “Maple Whiteboard” and the brochure described what we had gradually come to appreciate that engineers wanted from a calculation tool:

simplicity at its beating heart – just learn a few basic game mechanics, and then everything else “flows” (ahem).
units support from the get-go
documentation features to describe the analysis
connectivity with other software
engineering-focused math functions

The first working version of Maple Whiteboard was crude…but the basic building blocks were in place and the concept worked. This image dates from 2019.

We unveiled Maple Flow to the public in 2021 (coming up with the name was a trial in of itself). Here’s what it looked like.

The target audience loved the new product—they liked what it could do now and were excited about its future potential. Our initial assumptions had been validated!

Maple Flow has evolved dramatically since the fever dream of the initial brochure and early prototypes. Even though it's much more powerful now, we've made sure it’s still simple to use.

Today, I’m delighted to announce the launch of Maple Flow 2025. This release is a major turning point for the product. You'll see a clean, new interface, faster performance, and more tools for documentation and moving your work from other programs.

Let me touch on my personal highlights.

A new interface headlines the release! It’s clean and simple, with logically ordered buttons in organized groups.

The ribbon is contextual; for example, click on an image, and you’ll see tools for adding shapes and text.

There's always room for improvement and refinement. Let me know what you think!.

You can now insert a table of contents into your document. The page numbers automatically update, and headings are hyperlinked – just click and you jump to that part of the worksheet.

Hyperlinks in the table of contents are preserved when you export the worksheet to PDF – that’s an awesome navigation feature when you distribute your work.

This feature gives me a visual dopamine hit every time I use it. Look how easy it is to use!

We've decided to release a tool we’ve been using internally for some time. The Maple Flow Migration Assistant is a free addon that helps you convert your Mathcad 13, 14 and 15 worksheets to Maple Flow.

You can convert single Mathcad worksheets or point to a folder for bulk conversion. You also get many function translations.

Automatically converting executable code between two different high-level math tools is difficult; some manual reworking is probably needed for anything that’s not simple arithmetic (we documented what the Migration Assistant does here). But if you’ve already decided to make the switch from Mathcad 13, 14 or 15, then the Migration Assistant is a great time saver.

Large worksheets now evaluate faster! These are benchmarks from our internal testing suite.

You can now run Maple Flow worksheets through Excel via a simple function call. You can change parameters and get updated results.

To help you set up that function call, an interface walks you through the process.

You can use this feature to develop a simple spreadsheet reporting dashboard or perform parameter sweeps on your Flow analyses.

Large analysis projects can be difficult to manage.

The results of one worksheet might need to be used in another,
there may be equations that are reused everywhere,
or you might need to split your project into small chunks that different people can work on separately

Well, now we’ve made that whole process easier! You can now treat Flow worksheets as “black box” functions that you can call from other Flow worksheets. You can even change parameter values, and return updated results

The AI Formula Assistant made its debut in Maple 2025 and it sparked a lot of interest (and some interesting conversations about the future of AI in math software).

By popular demand, we've brought this feature into Flow. You can now look up an engineering formula with a simple natural language query,

That's enough of my personal highlights. If you want to know more, visit the What's New pages for a complete rundown and grab a trial.

If you haven’t tried Maple Flow yet, now is the right time to jump in. We have several time-limited launch offers to make the transition to Flow as frictionless as possible; these include offers for users who are

deploying a small suite of licenses
switching from other tools
in large organizations that need a full implementation plan.

As ever, we can only keep Maple Flow on track if you let me know what you want - send all your feedback my way.

Announcing Maple 2025

Samir Khan — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 18:32:31 Z

I’m absolutely delighted to announce the launch of Maple 2025!

Although you see a new release every year, new features take anything from a few fast-paced weeks to develop, to months of careful cultivation.

Working on so many features in parallel, each with varying time scales, isn't easy! We have to fastidiously manage and track our work.

So it's easy to lose ourselves in the daily minutiae of software development. To help us maintain perspective, we constantly ask ourselves questions like:

What user problem are we solving and how often does this problem occur?
Can we validate our proposed solution with preliminary user feedback?
Is this a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and will never exist, or are we pre-empting a future need?
Are we offering value to our users?

Given the answers, we course-correct to make sure we stay on track for our central mission - to make you happy, and to keep you coming back year-after-year.

With Maple 2025, I think we've smashed that goal. We have many new features that'll appeal to many different types of users - from students, educators and mathematicians, to engineers, scientists and technical professionals

Let me walk you through some of my personal highlights.

It’ll be difficult for anyone to miss this - Maple 2025 has a new interface! It’s a ribbon-based UI that look clean and contemporary, and helps you find and discover tools more quickly than before.

You have large, meaningful icons.

Items are logically grouped.

The ribbons is contextual. If you click on a plot, you get new tabs for interacting with and drawing on the plot.

A new Education tab collects pedagogical resources that were scattered around the interface in prior releases.

This is the biggest visual overhaul to Maple in many years. We hope you like it!

We also appreciate that changes in look and feel can be divisive. Please rest assured that we will refine and finesse the interface with each successive release; your comments and suggestions are most welcome.

The new interface is available on Windows and Linux, and as a technology preview on Mac.

The right arrow key on my keyboard is wearing out…and it’s all because of Maple. I’m knee deep in Maple nearly every day entering equations, and I’m always using right-arrow to move the cursor. It gets kind of tedious!

This anecdote reflects some investigative work we did. We comprehensively examined our internal library of thousands of Maple worksheets and discovered that these three input patterns are extremely common.

Previously, you’d use the right-arrow key to move the cursor out of the exponential, division or subscript.

Now, in Maple 2025, when you

type ^, /, or enter a literal subscript with a double-underscore,
followed by a number or symbol
and then input another operator (such as +)

the operator is automatically inserted on the baseline (except when y = 1).

Of course, you can also make the cursor return to or stay in the exponent or denominator with a simple keystroke, when that is what is needed.

This is one of those little quality of life refinements that I’m very fond of - it’s a little visual and usability dopamine hit.

The sum command (and its typeset form) now indexes into vectors without you needing to spam unevaluation quotes all over your expression.

Maple 2024	Maple 2025

We’ve been integrating units deeper into the Maple system, release after release. Much of this is driven by our engineering users.

A few releases ago, we made int(numeric) compatible with units. With Maple 2025, you can now numerically differentiate expressions and procedures that have units.

I’m a grizzled thermodynamics hack, so here’s an example in which I calculate the specific heat capacity of water by differentiating enthalpy with respect to temperature (and then confirm the result with the built-in value):

This is in addition to many other improvements to the units experience.

Although this is a part of Maple that I don’t touch often (my colleague Karishma takes point on the education side), I REALLY wish I’d had this when I was struggling with math.

You can now automatically generate unlimited variants of the same problem for students to solve with the Try Another feature, which has been added to Maple’s Check My Work tools (another feature I really could have used!). This is available for many common math principles, including factorization, simplification, integration and more.

This is just one of the improvements in Maple 2025 for teaching and learning.

If you’ve ever found yourself going back and forth (and back and forth) between two large, almost identical-looking Maple expressions, trying to figure out how they are different, you’re going to love this one. ExpressionTools is a new package that lets you compare the differences between two expressions.

I really like the use of color to highlight differences. Less squinting at the screen!

You can now run Maple Flow worksheets from Maple (you don’t need Maple Flow installed to do this). You can send parameters into the Flow worksheet and extract your desired results.

This means you can use the entire flexibility of Maple to analysis and manipulate your Flow worksheet. You could, for example:

Attach a Flow worksheet to a Maple workbook and create an interactive application
Carry out parameter studies of a Flow worksheet by evaluating it over many parameter sets in Maple
Create an Excel interface for a Flow worksheet using the Maple add-in for Excel

Simplify is one of those functions that literally tens of thousands of people use each day. Every time we make an incremental improvement, the cumulative benefits across our entire user base are significant.

We’ve refined simplify in a number of critical ways. For example, simplify now recognizes when exponentials can be profitably converted to hyperbolic trig functions:

The analysis of many scientific phenomena result in Laplace transforms that do not have a symbolic inverse which can be expressed in terms of elementary functions. This includes applications in heat transfer, fluid mechanics, fractional diffusion processes, control systems and electrical transmission.

For example, this monster Laplace transform results from an analysis of voltage on a transmission line:

You can now numerically invert this transform courtesy of an enhancement to inttrans:-invlaplace - a fast quadrature method.

I’ve saved what I think has the most future potential for last.

I’m sure nearly all of you have experimented with the various AI tools. They’re an inevitable part of our present and future, whether we're comfortable with it or not.

This is something we've been mulling over for some time.

In Maple 2019, the DeepLearning package made its debut. This package provides tools for machine learning, supporting operations such as classification and regression using neural networks.
In Maple 2024, we introduced an AI-powered formula lookup feature.

In Maple 2025, we’re giving you an early-stage technology preview of AI-powered document generation.

You can automatically generate worksheet content by prompting an AI, and then gradually refine the content

If you’re an educator, you might want some content that describes applications of calculus. So you might ask the AI “How do I derive the formula for the area of a circle” by entering your prompt into this text box:

This is the worksheet content that may be returned:

If you’re structural engineer who wants to know how to calculate the hardness of concrete, you might ask the AI: “How do I calculate the compressive strength of slow hardening concrete as a function of time? Use the CEB-FIP Model Code 90. Include a worked example with Maple code”.

This worksheet content that could be generated (note the live Maple code):

We’re labelling AI-generated worksheet content as a technology preview. You might see

text that might be misleading (but sounds plausible)
code that doesn’t work (but looks plausible)
or different results each time you click “Generate Document”

For the moment, I would not rely on AI-generated worksheet content without realistic expectations, a healthy dose of scepticism and a modicum of detached analysis. But AI models are rapidly growing in robustness, and we want to position ourselves to best exploit their future potential. The next few years will be VERY exciting.

We can never cover everything in a short blog post like this. So if you want to know more, head on over to the What’s New pages for Maple 2025!

Phasors and Drop-Down List Boxes Lead the Way in Flow 2024.2

Samir Khan — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 20:09:30 Z

With Maple Flow, we’re regularly rolling out exciting updates. Each offers new features, as well as resolving many user-reported issues.

Flow 2024.2 lives up to that track record. Two major new features - drop-down menus and phasors - make their debut. We've also made many other quality-of-life enhancements.

Drop-down list boxes make your worksheets more tactile and interactive. The menu items can be defined in a matrix or vector, or in a table. You can return the index of the selected item, or return an entire row or column of a matrix.

An important use case is populating the contents of a drop-down menu with data from an external file. In movie below, we

import a database of steel shapes and their associated properties
populate the drop-down menu with the steel shapes in the first column of the imported data
based upon the selected shape, use ArrayTools:-Lookup to return a property
and finally perform a design analysis.

If you look carefully, you'll see that you can hide commands on a per-container basis to make your worksheets cleaner.

We have a large number of power system engineers who want to model electrical systems in phasor notation.

Entering a phasor is easy - just enter the magnitude, the angle character and then the angle. Phasors evaluate to rectangular complex numbers but can be recast to phasor format with the Context Panel.

You can also associate a unit with the magnitude and angle. On output, you can change units inline or via the Context Panel.

You can also prevent floating point approximation of phasors using the symbolic toggle on each container.

We've also made a raft of other improvements. Extracting slices of matrices is faster, and you can now enter units in 2d notation in the Context Panel (particularly useful when you want to change the units of everything inside a matrix).

As ever, the new features are driven by you. The only way you can point us the right direction is by telling us what you want. Don't be shy!

Announcing Maple Flow 2024

Samir Khan — Wed, 15 May 2024 17:34:36 Z

We've just launched Maple Flow 2024!

You're in the driving seat with Maple Flow - each new feature has a straight-line connection to a user-driven demand to work faster and more efficiently.

Head on over here for a rundown of everything that's new, but I thought I'd share my personal highlights here.

If your result contains a large vector or matrix, you can now scroll to see more data. You can also change the size of the matrix to view more or fewer rows and columns.

You can resize rows and columns if they're too large or small, and selectively enable row and column headers.

If the vector or matrix in your result contains a unit, you can now rescale units with the Context Panel (for the entire matrix) or inline (for individual entries).

A few releases ago, we introduced the Variables palette to help you keep track of all the user-defined parameters at point of the grid cursor.

You can now insert variables into the worksheet from the Variables palette. Just double-click on the appropriate name.

Maple Flow already features command completion - just type the first few letters of a command, and a list of potential completions appears. Just pick the completion you need with a quick tap of the Tab key.

We've supercharged this feature to give potential arguments for many popular functions. Type a function name followed by an opening bracket, and a list appears.

In case you've missed it, the argument completion list also features (when they make sense) user-defined variables.

You can now link to different parts of the same worksheet. This can be used to create a table of contents that lets you jump to different parts of larger worksheets.

This page lists everything that's new in the current release, and all the prior releases. You might notice that we have three releases a year, each featuring many user-requested items. Let me know what you want to see next - you might not have to wait that long!

Announcing Maple Flow 2023

Samir Khan — Wed, 31 May 2023 19:02:44 Z

We've just launched Maple Flow 2023!

The new release offers many enhancements that help you calculate and write reports faster, resulting in polished technical documents. Let me describe a few of my favorite new features below.

You can now change the units of results inline in the canvas, without taking your hands off the keyboard. You can still use the Context Panel, but the new method is faster and enhances the fluid workflow that Flow exemplifies.

You can also enter a partial unit inline; Flow will automatically insert more units to dimensionally balance the system.

This is useful when results are returned in base dimensions (like time, length and mass) but you want to rescale to higher-level derived units. For an energy analysis, for example, you might guess that the result should contain units of Joules, plus some other units, but you don't know what those other units are; now, you can request that the result contains Joules, and Flow fills the rest in automatically.

The new Variables Palette lists all the user-defined variables and functions known to Flow at the point of the cursor. If you move your grid cursor up or down, the variables palette intelligently removes or adds entries.

You can now import an image by simply dragging it from a file explorer into the canvas.

This is one of those small quality-of-life enhancement that makes Flow a pleasure to use.

You can now quickly align containers to create ordered, uncluttered groups.

We've packed a lot more into the new release - head on over here for a complete rundown. And if you're tempted, you can get a trial here.

We have a lot more in the pipeline - the next 12 months will be very exciting. Let me know what you think!