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How-To: Equation Management in Word 2011

Mark Crump — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 23:33:40 +0000

Math and science people rejoice: Equation editing finally makes its appearance in Office for Mac’s Word 2011. If you’re a student or work in an academic setting, putting equations into your papers can be a pain, but no longer. Here’s a quick breakdown of how to use the latest version of Word on the Mac to make it a hurt a little less.

Math 101: The Basics

As with citation management, you access the math tools under the Document Elements tab on the ribbon.
Clicking the pi symbol brings you to a ribbon where you can either select from a commonly-used equation or build one of your own.
Let’s say we want to solve x²+5x+6=0 using the Quadratic Formula. For those unfamiliar with the formula, in this case a=1, b=5, c=6. Choose Quadratic Formula from the pull-down and then enter in the correct values.
Working through the first part is just a copy, paste and change of the previous equation.
While we could keep cutting and pasting, this is a good time to demonstrate adding your own equations. Lets do the fractions by hand. The final result will look like this:
Choose fraction from the ribbon and click on the first option.
Enter -5 into the numerator. To get the +/- symbol, use the Math Symbols pane in the ribbon:
For the radical, choose Radical from the ribbon:
I just cut, pasted, and changed the fraction to get the rest of the equation transcribed.

Math 102: Conclusions

One big problem I had, as you can see from the screenshot, is fractions are compressed to fit into a line. Using the preset quadratic formula looks ok, but once Word interprets the formula as a fraction, it’s noticeably smaller. While I can resize the font size on fractions, it also resizes the equal sign. Is it a huge problem? No, but it’s something that annoyed me. Another little annoyance is if I enclose a fraction in parenthesis, the parentheses don’t extend the full height of the fraction; they are standard-sized parenthesis.

I think users with a heavy requirement to typeset equations will still be better served using a tool such as LaTeX, which is designed to write articles with lots of math formulas. LaTeX has a fairly hefty learning requirement, though, so Word’s editor is fine for light-to-medium users.

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How-To: Manage Citations in Word 2011

Mark Crump — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 23:45:35 +0000

One of the advantages Word 2011 has over Pages ’09 is its stellar, built-in citation management; Pages’ integration is reliant on third-party tools. Word 2011 has its bibliographic tools baked right in. You’ll find them under Citations and References in the Document Elements section of the ribbon. Want to learn how to use them? We’ve got you covered.

A few things about references to get out of the way: Currently, most third-party citation software does not work with Word 2011. Luckily, Word’s citation tools are fairly good on their own. However, if you already have an extensive library in one of those apps, you’re going to be out of luck until they get upgraded.

Also, remember that to be able to keep editing the citations and bibliography after you’ve saved, you’ll need to make sure you’ve saved the document in .docx format, and not as a .doc.

Managing Citations

To manage your citations, click on the Manage button in the ribbon and click the + button in the lower left-hand corner of the window. This will bring up the Create New Source dialog box.
Fill it in with all the relevant information.
After you enter the relevant info, the citation will appear in the document, and in the citation list in the “Manage” dialog box.
To edit the page range of the citation, click on the arrow to the right of the citation, choose Edit this Citation and enter the page number.
Choose "Edit This Citation"

Enter in the page range

Updated Citation

Bibliographies

Once you’ve got your citations in, it’s time to build the bibliography.

To create a bibliography, choose Bibliography from the Document Elements section of the ribbon and choose which type of bibliography you want to insert. Note: You’re probably going to need to insert a page break if you’re working within MLA requirements, as I most often am.
The bibliography is now in the document as an object. If you insert more references, click the arrow next to it and choose Update Citations and Bibliography.
In-place Citation

How to Update Citation

Final Words

Citation management in Word 2011 is largely unchanged from Word 2008; the only big difference is you now invoke it from the ribbon. While citations are included in Word, there are advantages to using a third-party tool, like EndNote, but until it gets a compatibility update, doing your bibliographic work right in Word is probably your best bet.

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Word 2011: The Word I’ve Been Waiting For

Mark Crump — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:00:10 +0000

Word 2008 quickly fell out of favor with me. It consistently crashed on exit. It was horribly slow, and struggled to keep up with itself. If Word 2011 did nothing more than feel faster and crash less often, I’d consider it money well spent. But Microsoft went beyond that with the new version, just as it did with PowerPoint.

New Features

The Office suite has been criticized for being bloated, but I’m reminded of the old adage “You can only please some of the people some of time.” Or, in software terms, “One person’s bloat is another person’s critical feature.”

Take the return of Visual Basic macros. Reviewers are praising its return from the mountaintops, but I’ve never used the feature and didn’t miss it. However, the addition of an equation editor while I’m the midst of my first algebra class in 20 years has me positively giddy.

An academic annoyance that’s not Microsoft’s fault is that EndNote, a popular citation management program, isn’t yet compatible with Word 2011. While Word does have its own citation manager, I’d rather see EndNote support, as it can connect to my university’s library and grab all the relevant information.

The Ribbon

The ribbon interface from the Windows version also makes its appearance in Word 2011, although there was a sort-of-proto-version in Word 2008. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth has occurred since the announcement, but after finally getting my hands on, I find it helpful. You can easily make it go away with one click, but I don’t recommend it; spending some time figuring it out will pay dividends in increased productivity later.

My biggest complaint with the ribbon is, oddly, that not everything is on it. Word 2011 has a nice full screen view — similar to Scrivener’s — but it can only be accessed via the View menu. While ribbon-haters may cheer this, it can slow learning down as you stop to check whether something is on the ribbon or not.

Word 2011 ribbon.

Toolbox and Services Integration

Also not fully migrated to the ribbon is the old Toolbox. In Word 2008, the Toolbox was where you’d do a lot of heavy lifting. It’s still there, and it’s where you edit styles and insert citations. While you can right-click on a style in the ribbon to modify it, I found the Windows way of doing things a little more user-friendly.

Snow Leopard’s improved Services seemed to catch Word 2008 by surprise. Selected text, for instance, didn’t a trigger a text-related Service. Fortunately, that is much improved, as Word 2011 sees text as, well, text. Native support for accessing your iPhoto library is also included. Previously, this required a custom Service to work.

Word 2011 services.

General Usage

Ok, now that we’ve gotten what’s new, different, and the same out of the way, how is Word 2011 in actual usage? Pretty darn good. Word 2008 was so bad an experience for me, I’d switched to Pages. It was faster and more stable, and I don’t collaborate enough with Office users for issues to really arise.

However, Pages is also a consumer-level product. My day gig is a technical writer for a large corporation, and there’s no way I can do that work in Pages. It’s just not equipped for heavy lifting. Another big benefit for work is that Word 2011 can now “paste and match formatting” right from the menu bar. Gone is the need for several mouse clicks to do a simple task.

The only crash I’ve encountered in my admittedly light testing was a hang up with sharing a document. By now, Word 2008 would’ve thrown several fits. I tend to agree with Gartner Analyst Mike Gartenberg, who tweeted “Totally love the new Office for Mac. Possibly best version of Office. Ever.” Given speed advantages alone, Word 2011 is going to be one of my go-to text wranglers. My general plain-text and creative writing will still be done in Scrivener, but all my school and business work will happily go to Word 2011.

A More Versatile Word

I’ve been very, very impressed with this version. I threw a couple of worst-case documents at it — custom templates with imported Visio documents created on the PC, and a user guide I created with a boatload of graphics — and it didn’t hiccup. If, like me, you thought Word 2008 was a blight upon the land, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with Word 2011. If you’re an academic user, with the built-in citation and equation management, Word is clearly the leader here. If you’re using Word for work, then the time saved thanks to speed boosts and fewer crashes will go even further toward justifying the cost.

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