How Do I Type Fractions Using a Mac Keyboard?

Comments: One Response to “How Do I Type Fractions Using a Mac Keyboard?”

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Depends on which app and what kind of fractions. For instance, there are special characters for the most common fractions. Use the Emoji and special character viewer to find those characters (Control+Command+Space) and search for "fraction." So you can do things like ½, ⅔, ⅗ and so on.

By default, you should have text replacements set in System Preferences, Keyboard, Text so that typing something like a 1/2 will convert to ½ automatically.

In some apps like Pages, you can use just a slash with two numbers and that's what you see in most documents. So 1/2, 3/10 or 17/56. If the app supports superscript and subscript like Pages, you can always make the numerator superscript and denominator subscribe to add a little extra formatting.

In Numbers, you can set the format of a cell to be a fraction. So the value is always an actual real value, shown with decimals, like 0.5. But the cell can display that as 1/2 if you use fractions.

In Pages and some other apps like Word, you can use Insert, Equation to type mathematical formulas using either the LaTeX or MathML languages. So by using \frac{1}{2} in there you get a 1 with a horizontal line, and a 2 under it. Try it.

If I take your question literally, then you just want to "enter fractions" and don't care about how they are displayed. Again, it depends on the app. Since you are using number values, I will assume the Numbers app. You an just enter the fraction as a formula. So type = in a cell to enter formula mode, and type the fraction using a /. So =1/2 will enter that as a formula, calculate the result, and you'll get 0.5 as the result value. Hardly needed for 0.5, but for =17/56 it makes more sense.

You can do the same thing in Spotlight when trying to calculate things. So you can type 5*(17/56) to multiple 5 times seventeen fifty-sixths. No need to know that 17/16 if 0.3036.