How does Maple Compare to a Graphing Calculator?
Maple is easier to use than a graphing calculator, does a better job solving mathematical problems and creating plots, and provides more extensive mathematics, learning tools, and a technical documentation environment. Maple can help you with your courses today, next year and even after graduation.
Maple is Easier to Use
 Maple lets you enter your mathematics using natural mathematical notation, including standard abbreviations. For example, 10x means “10 times x”, and y' means y'(x).
Maple’s Clickable Math™ techniques allow you to enter and solve problems with a click of a button. Maple provides palettes, context-sensitive menus for mathematical operations, interactive tutors for learning and doing precalculus, calculus, linear algebra, and other subjects, assistants for in-depth explorations, and task templates for multi-step problems. With these tools, you can solve your problems quickly, easily and accurately.
And because you are in a word-processor-like environment, you have a large screen that holds lots of information at the same time. It is easy to scroll up and change your original problem; copying and pasting or dragging and dropping are all available; and, you can have multiple screens, including help pages, open simultaneously.
Maple Does it Better
Maple’s mathematical abilities are superior to those of a graphing calculator.
Exact answers - Maple gives exact answers, not numeric approximations. If the answer is  that is what Maple will give you. If you want Maple to approximate the answer for you, just tell Maple how many digits you want, and Maple will do that too.
Modify problems - With Maple, you can change your problem in place using the 2-D editor. Then you can ask Maple to recalculate all your steps with the new values. All intermediate steps are updated. All plots are updated. Just make your change, and click a button.
More graphs - Maple has over 150 plot types and options built into the product. Dozens of different 2-D and 3-D plots and animations can be created with a click of a button, and the rest can be created with a single command. Plot options such as changing colors, line thicknesses, and placement of tick marks can be set using menus. You can zoom, pan, and rotate 3-D plots interactively.
Self-documenting - Maple automatically generates a record of the steps performed using the context-sensitive menus. That way, your work is easier for you and others to follow.
 Maple Does More
Maple provides much more functionality than a graphing calculator.
Symbolic maths - Maple includes the ability to do symbolic math as well as numeric calculations. This means that you can ask Maple to:
- Integrate
 with respect to x.
- Calculate the determinant of
- Or solve the set of inequalities {x + y < 10, x² = 9} for x, assuming y>10.
- Factor 6x² + 18x - 24.
More maths - Maple includes support for basic and advanced algebra, calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, transforms, optimisation, graph theory, differential geometry, and a whole lot more. Maple will stay with you throughout your complete academic career and beyond into the workplace, whether that workplace is an engineering design firm, a university research institute, a high school classroom, or any technical position.
Education tools - Maple comes with a series of student packages and interactive tutors specifically designed to help you learn mathematical concepts from precalculus, calculus, linear algebra and more. Tutors provide easy visualisation of difficult concepts (including 2-D and 3-D animations) and step-by-step problem solving complete with hints, including step-by-steps solvers for integration and differentiation. Maple also has a math dictionary, an Exploration Assistant for easy visual explorations of mathematical expressions, a Student Portal, and a Student Help Centre.
Technical documents - Maple incorporates a complete technical document environment, completely integrated with its interactive calculation tools. You can add titles, explanations (written in text and in mathematical notation), diagrams, sections and more. You can add legends, titles, arrows and free-hand drawings to plots and images. And of course, you can save your work, print it out, export it to other formats, and share it with your colleagues, or even turn it into a full-blown interactive application with buttons, sliders, plots, dials and more.
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Redefining Usability
State-of-the-Art Visualisation Capabilities
Extensive Collection of Built-in Mathematical Algorithms
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Clickable Math
Extensive Collection of Built-in Mathematical Algorithms
State-of-the-Art Visualisation Capabilities
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