Creating fractions
There are several ways to create fractions in Word, but only one of them will produce fractions in the same style as ¼, ½, and ¾. Luckily, if what you need fractions for is recipes, this way will suffice. As you can see from the screen shot below, many fonts include the characters for 1/3, 2/3, 1/8, 3/8, 5/8, and 7/8. These, along with ¼, ½, and ¾, should be all you need for typing most recipes.
Note for Mac users: Don’t expect to see a display like the one above in Word for the Mac. Although many Mac fonts contain at least the ¼, ½, and ¾ fractions, the MacRoman Character Set does not contain them, so there are no built-in keystrokes for the characters, and the Insert Symbol dialog in Word won’t show you the characters, because it is capable of showing only the characters present in the MacRoman character set. You have to look such characters up in the Character Palette (available only if you have OS X) or PopChar if you have it in OS 9. You have to display the Unicode keyboard (and get it to work…), then enter the character in hexadecimal. The fraction fonts mentioned below may be the only way you can access fraction glyphs; if you can’t justify purchase of special fonts, you will need to rely on one of the alternative methods described below.
As shown above, these characters appear in the Number Forms subset of Unicode fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New. You can insert them from the Insert | Symbol dialog in Word 97 and above. In Word 2002, you can also insert them using the shortcut keys shown (such as 2153, Alt+X for 1/3) or shortcut keys that you assign. In Mac Word, you need a macro (available from the newsgroup) to insert Unicode characters. You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to them.
If you want these fractions to behave the way ¼, ½, and ¾ do, however, you will need to create AutoCorrect entries from them (see “Exploiting AutoCorrect” for instructions on creating AutoCorrect entries). The easiest way to do this, of course, is to create AutoCorrect entries to replace 1/3, 2/3, etc., with the equivalent font characters. That is what most users will do. But users sometimes type dates in M/d or d/M format and don’t want the date for January 2 (or February 1) turned into ½. They therefore disable the AutoFormat As You Type feature to “Replace fractions (1/2) with fraction character (½).” If you are one of those users, then choose different trigger text for your AutoCorrect entries. You could, for example, use 1;3 instead of 1/3. Once you have set up AutoCorrect entries for all six of these extra fractions, you’ll be all set to type recipes.
In addition to the fraction glyphs available in most Unicode fonts, you can purchase fonts that contain only fractions. For example, Adobe sells PostScript fraction fonts to match its New Century Schoolbook and Helvetica fonts. To use these, however, you would have to change fonts and insert the fraction characters using the Insert | Symbol dialog or a keyboard chart.
Equation Editor is supplied with all versions of Word but is not installed by default (in the Typical install), so you may need to rerun Setup to install it. To do this, Go to Control Panel | Add/Remove Programs, select Microsoft Office, and click the Change button. In the first page, select “Add or Remove Features.” On the next page, expand “Office Tools.” Select Equation Editor and set it to “Run from My Computer.” Click the Update button, and insert the Office CD when prompted. On the Mac, look on your Office CD for the application.
Once Equation Editor is installed, you can use Insert | Object | Microsoft Equation 3.0 to insert an equation object. If you’ll be doing a lot of this, you’ll want to add an Equation Editor toolbar button (
). Open Tools | Customize and select the Commands tab. In the Insert category, scroll the Commands list till you find Equation Editor. Select the command with your mouse and drag it to a toolbar (or the Insert menu).
The Equation Editor applet has its own Help file, and you can also findhelpful tips at the Web site of Design Science, which supplies the application to Microsoft. If you need more features than EE offers, you can also download a trial version of MathType, of which Equation Editor is a cut-down version. If you decide not to purchase MathType at the end of the trial period, it will degrade into MathType Lite, a souped-up version of Equation Editor; you’ll still be able to edit the equations you created with MathType, and you’ll continue to have access to the full set of MathType fonts and symbols. Design Science also offers atutorial on creating AutoCorrect entries from Equation Editor objects.
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