A guide to Microsoft Office's equation editor

If you have an interest in maths, Microsoft Office comes with a powerful equation editor. Fire it up by going to Insert, Object, Microsoft Equation 3.

That version number is unchanged from Office 97 to 2007, and what you get is a toolbar bristling with fly-out palettes of symbols and operators, few of which I can even pretend to understand.

There is, however, another way of creating equations and similar constructions should you not have Microsoft Equation 3 installed, or if you prefer to work using the keyboard.

The EQ field lets you build an equation using field codes. Let me say first that I am indebted to Richard Regal, a stalwart of the CIX Word conference, who provided some detailed instructions with some fine examples, and is truly a person outstanding in his field.

The CIX discussion started with someone wanting to enclose three lines in a left curly bracket. Now you can use the brackets in the Autoshapes, Basic Shapes section of the Word drawing toolbar, but it’s fiddly and the results won’t be very satisfactory.

So, Insert, Field, choose Equations and Formulae from the Categories list, and select the EQ field. Do not click the Equation Editor button on the right, instead click the Field Codes button below the list.

Add the following switches (it’s probably easier to do this manually, than by selecting them from the Options list): EQ \B \lc\{ (\A 4 (line1,line2,line3,))

There is no space between lc and the following backslash. If you have got it right then you should see something like the top-left item in screen ­ we’ve split the window as per last month’s tip to show codes above and results below.

So what does it all mean? The first switch \B announces that you want to bracket an expression. Next, the \lc\{ switch means that a left curly bracket will be used, but you can specify any character after \lc\.

If you want a closing bracket as well use the \bc\{ switch ­ it’s smart enough to realise the closing bracket should be right-handed.

Everything within the outer set of plain parentheses will be included in the curly brackets. The \A switch tells us an array follows, again in parentheses with a comma separating each line.

To take another example, the \R switch starts a root expression. EQ \R (3,x+y) produces the cube root of x+y, but perfectionists will find the 3 too big. You can use another switch, \s, to specify subscript, but it’s rather complicated, so I cheated and formatted the actual 3 in the field code as subscript.