Adding Mathematical Equations To Your Documents

You can add simple or complex mathematical equations to your Pages or other word processing documents using the Grapher app that comes with your Mac. The equations become scalable images that you can place anywhere in your document. You can also save them in a Grapher document to use again or alter later on.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let me show you how to create mathematical equations which then you can insert into your documents and presentations.
So with Pages, of course, you can enter in just about anything by creating text boxes and then putting text boxes on top of each other with shapes. So I can do like a 1 here. I'll copy that and put a 2. Put them right underneath each other. I can set them both so that there is no text wrap. Make it easy to position them where I want. Put a line underneath it. Set that also to no text wrap. Then you can really create something like that.
But that is a lot of work and difficult to do the bigger the formula gets. So if you want to do a really cool mathematical formula the trick is to use the Grapher app.
You can find the Grapher app in Applications under Utilities. There it is. Or you can just search for it using Launchpad. It does a whole bunch of different things that we are not going to deal with. It does these cool graphs, 2D and 3D, and all of that. We won't work with those.
Instead we're just going to use that just to get the formula. So we're just going to do a simple 2D graph and right here at the top is where you create a formula. We will select it and clear that out so we can start creating our formula.
Now this is kind of a thing where you have to experiment and play around. For instance if I just type � you see when I hit the dividing sign, the slash that is also the question mark key on your keyboard, it automatically creates that. I can also use characters. So I can do a+b, like that, equals c. 
If I wanted to do something to have powers then what I want is to bring up under Windows the equation palette. Then here I've got several different tabs and I can use the standard tab here and see here is the squared and here is the cubed. So if I start with say a I can hit squared right there plus type b and then hit that again and I get that.
Also parentheses work where you start with the left parenthesis and then you enter in what is supposed to be there. So I'm going to copy, cut that, and paste that in there and then I can do divided by c cubed for instance. I can get rid of these parentheses really easily. I want to select just for the left parenthesis and you can see it gets rid of the whole thing.
So I think there is a lot of different things that I can do. There is a lot of different characters. You can see I can do all sorts of things like integrals and lots of Greek characters and symbols, special symbols. I can enter in and do whatever I want to do to create a complex mathematical equation or formula that then I can use in Pages.
So how do I use it in Pages. Well, I'm going to simply select the whole thing and copy, Command C, and then I'll switch to my Pages document here. Let's clear all of this stuff out. Just as part of my regular text I'm going to paste in this formula, Command V. It pastes in as an image so I can do all the arrangement that I want. I can it Move with Text. I can have Text Wrap work lots of different ways. I can move it around and put it in my text where I want it to be. 
So the formula here is basically treated just like an image, like a photo that you would bring in. Since I have it moving with the text you can see there is the insertion point if I were to move the text. You can see the formula moves with it relative to that point there. If I were to grab it and move it around then it would stay relative to it.
There is a lot of different things that you can do but it is all the same as if this were an image. However it's a really good image because it's vector based which means it scales. So if I scale it up you can see how nice and smooth the characters are. So I can make this any size I want and it will always look good. Unlike some other ways you might do it where you might see the letters and numbers pixelated.
Now if I want to change this formula what I need to do is go back to Grapher and change it in here. So you probably want to save along side of your regular document this document here that has your equations in it. You can add multiple equations in a single document. So you can continue to include all the equations that you use for your Pages document in this Grapher document. 
Save it along side it and if you need to make a change you can select it, go in, edit it, and then select the entire thing again. Copy it, switch to Pages, and paste it in. There is your new version. You can move that one and use this on instead.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Adding Mathematical Equations To Your Documents”

Rob Crutcher

10 years ago

Say, I don't seem to have a Mac application on my MacBook Pro running Yosemite that is called Grapher. The program you're describing looks like a graphing program that used to be installed on all Macs, but it doesn't seem to be anymore.

Actually, I found Grapher in the Utilities folder (you might want to mention that to people). However, when I copied my equation from Grapher, it would not paste into Pages or into MS Word. I just kept getting a beep and the 'Paste' command does not appear under the 'Edit' menu in Pages. I can't figure out why. The equation will past as 'Text' or as a 'Latext' object but that doesn't help at all.

Tajhad

He has mentioned " you find it in the utilities folder".

Stephen Froggatt

An excellent alternative to Equation Editor and MathType. This would cover most non-specialist work. Thank you for a really helpful video!

Marcos Delgado

Very helpful, but a little late! I was trying to do this and I went for an app to do this and found this free one "Daum Equation Editor" in the mac app store. But it is not vector based, so next time i'll use your option. Thanks Gary!!

Comments Closed.

Adding Mathematical Equations To Your Documents

Comments: 5 Responses to “Adding Mathematical Equations To Your Documents”

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