You may have noticed that if you type 1/2 in a Word document, the characters are converted automatically to a very nicely formatted fraction. The same is true for other common fractions, such as 1/4 and 3/4. This is because Word replaces those characters with actual single-character font representations of those fractions. Most fonts, however, don't have such characters for other less-common fractions.

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• Choose Numbers Preferences (from the Numbers menu at the top of your screen). Click Auto-Correction at the top of the preferences window. In the Formatting section, select the “Automatically format fractions” checkbox. Type a fraction (for example, 1/2), then press the Space bar and keep typing, or press Return.

Perhaps you’re working on a long document in Word in which you want an index with page numbers. Word in Office 2011 for Mac can automate this task for you. This procedure entails three steps: Generate a table of words or phrases to be indexed, saved as a special file called a concordance file. And to access these, you need to: Place your cursor where you want to insert the fraction. Go to Insert Symbol More Symbols. In the Subset menu, choose Number Forms. Select the fraction you want to use and click Insert. Use the division symbol to type a fraction. This may be done by first typing the numerator (the top number of the fraction), the forward slash key (/), and the denominator (the bottom number of a fraction). An example would look like 5/32.

One way around this conundrum is to fiddle with the font characteristics of the numbers in your fraction so that the fraction appears as desired. Many of the formatting settings depend on which font you are using, but you can use the following steps as guidance for how to proceed:

1. Type your fraction.
2. Select the numerator (the part to the left of the slash) and format it as superscript.
3. Select the denominator (the part to the right of the slash) and format it as subscript.
4. Replace the slash with a different 'slash-type' symbol, if desired.

There are a couple of things to point out about these seemingly simple steps. First of all, you don't have to use superscript and subscript, if you don't want to. (It is just simpler that way.) You can, if you so desire, just adjust the point size of the font used for the numerator and denominator. A good rule of thumb is to simply make the font size 50% of whatever type size your normal text is. For instance, if your text is 10-point, you would use 5-point; if it is 11-point, you would use 5.5-point.

Using this approach, the numerator would (of course) need to be raised a bit. This is done by following these steps:

1. Select the numerator.
2. Press Ctrl+D. Word displays the Font dialog box.
3. Click on the Character Spacing tab. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Character Spacing tab of the Font dialog box.

4. Change the Position pull-down list to Raised.
5. Change the By setting (beside the Position pull-down list) to a value equal to approximately 40% of your base point size. Thus, if you were using 10-point text, you would raise the position by 4 points. (This is just a suggestion. You will need to pick a value based on trail and error for the font you are using.)
6. Click on OK to close the Font dialog box.

Finally, if you decide to replace the slash in your fraction, you will need to pick one using the Symbol dialog box. The reason you may want to do this is that the slash used in the single-character fonts built into Word (you remember—those created when you type the characters '1/2') uses a slash that is at a different angle than the slash shown when you simply type a slash. There are several good options for this 'improved slash,' depending on the font you are using. You will need to look around and find the one you like the best.

Once you have created your fraction, the easiest way to use it is to define it as an AutoCorrect entry. (How to do this has been covered in other issues of WordTips.) Simply make sure that the AutoCorrect entry is saved as formatted text, and you will be able to use your new fraction quickly and easily.

If you use a limited number of fractions over and over again, the AutoCorrect approach is nice and easy. If you use a lot of different fractions, you can instead use a macro to provide the formatting you need. The following macro, FmtFraction, will use the superscript/subscript method to produce a formatted fraction.

To use the macro, simply position the insertion point at the end of the fraction you typed, and then run it. If you want to change the slash character used, change the character assigned to the NewSlashChar variable.

You can type fractions in text and word processing documents in a number of ways. The simplest is to use a slash character between numbers. This also works in cases where you want your Mac to perform calculations, like in Spotlight. But you can also format the fractions nicely using baseline shifts, special fraction characters, and the math equation editors in Pages and Word.

Check out 4 Ways To Type Fractions On a Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Creating Fractions In Word For Mac 2011 Full

Creating Fractions In Word For Mac 2011 Download

Video Transcript: These are special characters that are part of like the universal character set that all computers have. So you can actually use the ¼ character, I can just click on that and this is a single character, and that should show up okay on just about any computer.Now what if you want to use a fraction that's not one of those few that have special characters. Well, you have some options. The main option, and what most people use, is just use the slash key on your keyboard. So, for instance, if I wanted to type three sevenths I would just type 3 slash 7. This is so universally used that it's okay pretty much in any circumstance to use it. Maybe with the exception of the nicest typeset things like posters or something like that. But typically you can see this everywhere. You can see this in textbooks. You can see this in examples online and everything.Now this is a very important method of doing it because it's a method that the computer understands when you're doing math calculations. So for instance I'll do Command Space to bring up Spotlight here. If I type 3/7 you can see it actually calculates the result. So in any math equation I want to definitely use this technique. So it's nice sometimes when the way that you put something to be in a nice word processing document and the way you type something into Spotlight or Calculator or some other type of app it's the same. The same characters that you type. So you can just use a slash for fractions.Now you can make things look a little bit better. For instance I can select that first character there and I can go and change it to Baseline to make it superscript and then maybe make this second character here, the second number, the Baseline subscript. That creates a nicer looking fraction. As a matter of fact you even have the option to use a different slash. So you may have noticed when I do Control Command Space and search for fractions that there's another slash there. You can see that slash is a little bit more of a diagonal line than the other one. So you can use that.There are other things that you could do. You can decide to shrink the size of these numbers a little bit. You can use the Baseline to, you know, raise and lower a little bit. Or even make the denominator default. There's lots of things that you can do. You can play around with it until you get something that looks like what you want to see. So you have that option as well.In Pages you have another option because in Pages you can do mathematical formulas using Insert, Equation. Now you think you would be able to type something like 3/7 and get a nice looking fraction. But in fact you don't. You just get 3/7. It looks like maybe it doesn't do anything special with fractions. But there's a special function there. If you do a back slash, not a regular slash but a back slash, and Frac, that's a special function, then you do curly brackets and the first number, the numerator, and then curly brackets with the second number, the denominator, you get a nice fraction. You can put any number you want in there. So thirteen seventy sevenths, for instance. Or seven hundred and seventy sevenths. You just do Insert and then you get your fraction. This is kind of like an little image here. So I can Copy that and I can say switch over to TextEdit here and Paste that in. It's going to want to make sure it's a format that can handle that. You can paste it into Mail. So you can do these cool fractions using the Insert, Equation function in Pages and then go ahead and Copy and Paste that elsewhere if you need it somewhere else.Oh, and a couple quick notes here. If you're using Microsoft Word you can also do Insert, Equation but you don't have to do any special functions there. You can just actually type 3/7 and hit Return and it will convert it to a cool little fraction there. In addition, whether you're using TextEdit, Pages, Word, whatever, if you want to type the divide symbol, like you actually want to do an equation and show divide, just hold Option and then the regular slash and then you get the division symbol.

Creating Fractions In Word For Mac 2011 -

Creating Fractions In Word For Mac 2011 Free