Math in Office 2010
Imagine typing alt+= in PowerPoint, OneNote, Excel, and, of course, Word and Outlook to enter a math zone and then type a^2+b^2=c^2<space> to see the Pythagorean theorem beautifully typeset on your screen! Or some way more complicated equation, equally beautifully typeset. You don’t have to wait much longer as the people getting the Office 2010 Technical Preview this week can attest.
We’ve added the math editing and display of Word 2007 and Outlook 2007 to PowerPoint 2010, Excel 2010, and OneNote 2010 and improved the model a bit. For example, now the tooltips for the symbol and operator galleries display what you can type to enter these characters from the keyboard. It’s going to be so much fun to demo Office math using PowerPoint live! A slide deck generated with PowerPoint 2010 displays well with earlier versions of PowerPoint. You just can’t edit the slides with the earlier versions since those versions don’t understand math zones. In addition, Office 2010 running on Windows 7 has a very powerful new input method: recognition of hand written equations. This works with all math-enabled applications, but it is streamlined with OneNote 2010, as you might guess. If you’re taking lecture notes in a math, science, or engineering course, enjoy! Also install the math graphing-calculator add-on, which already works with Word 2007.
Adding math support to PowerPoint, OneNote and Excel text boxes hasn’t been easy. Word 2007’s math facility is a tour de force, from both display and user-interface points of view. Achieving the same display in the other applications was facilitated by using RichEdit and Page/Table/Line Services for math display and that was already working in Office 2007 (except for RichEdit 6.0’s lack of math-paragraph support). But the math user interface, which I’ve documented in a series of posts to this blog, is far from trivial. The devil is in the details and Word 2007 does an amazing job. Now all the applications behave similarly in math zones. Another area that required lots of effort is handling the various file formats and cut/copy/paste.
Our approach for Office 2010 hasn’t been to improve on what Word 2007 does, aside from a couple of small exceptions. Bringing the other apps into parity with Word 2007 was about all that one could hope for, given the relatively short development cycle, unforeseen documentation demands, the new web application support, backward compatibility, and the ODF file format support we added to both Office 2010 and 2007. Also we didn’t want to extend OMML or MathML to handle new features. There are a few improvements, such as, OneNote 2010 supports automatic arguments, and all apps except Word and Outlook support the invisible times as an equation line break as well as automatic build up of extended math autocorrect strings. For example, if you type \binomial<space> into a PowerPoint math zone, you immediately see the built-up (“Professional”) binomial-theorem equation, whereas in Word/Outlook you still need to choose the Professional option to build up the linear-format version of that equation. Conversely some Word/Outlook features haven’t been implemented in the other applications, such as custom matrix column spacings and alignments. These features might be helpful, notably for uses of matrices outside mathematics.
There’s nice MathML import/export support, which is documented here (I’ll do a separate post about that documentation). In particular, when the ODF file formats are used in Office 2010 applications, the math content is represented using MathML 2.0. And you can copy MathML to/from math engines such as Mathematica and Maple.
The bottom line is that if you need math editing and display, whether as a student or as a professional, Office 2010 on Windows 7 is a very compelling combination. If you have problems or suggestions, please feel free to post a comment on this blog or email me.
Comments
Anonymous
July 13, 2009
No equation numbering in Word?? :( That was the one thing missing to make this a complete solution. It also seems to be something VERY obvious. Plus, it seems that something like that is already in the standard, but just not implemented. I have a macro solution that works for me, but there is simply no way that I can use the new equations with co-authors on papers until this is sorted out. I guess three more years with MathType...Anonymous
July 13, 2009
Math in PowerPoint? AWESOME! :-) (I only wish I'd been able to use it a couple of weeks ago for a presentation I had to give - I had to drop back to MathType, and it was UGLY) Any chance that equation numbering will arrive in a service pack, or will we have to wait for O15?Anonymous
July 18, 2009
Why no math in Publisher? I believe there are much more publications which need math than excel sheets... Yes students can enjoy taking science notes, but what about publishing?Anonymous
July 18, 2009
Fantastic work. I was glad to see equations in Onenote (which is about time) but MathML and handwriting recognition are great additions, very pleasant surprises.Anonymous
July 19, 2009
The tooltips on symbols and operators with syntax are just great, I was looking for it from the beginning. Could they be added to the structures tooltip, too? I would be really interested how should be some written.Anonymous
July 19, 2009
I agree, the tooltips are a really valuable addition!Anonymous
July 20, 2009
This may have been covered In previous posts, but just in case, has MS worked with major scientific publishers to make sure that this time around the new equation format will be accepted into the workflow?Anonymous
July 24, 2009
Saw this when googled this. Seems interesting. http://elevatorlady.ca/Anonymous
October 15, 2009
A number of comments here have lamented the lack of a formal equation numbering facility. It seems that this topic is too big to address in a comment, so I wrote a post on this subject that may be of interest (see October, 2009). Also we have worked with the major scientific publishers to get docx into their infrastructure and progess is being made. But we still don't have a well-defined date for acceptance.Anonymous
November 25, 2009
Manual Equation Numbering works in Excel 2010, OneNote 2010 and also PowerPoint 2010 (Beta)!!! Your equation must be "Display" not "Inline"! In Display Equation you must create an "Equation array" ( eqarray ) and inside the array type your equation (e.q. E=mc^2) - so you have eqarray(E=mc^2). After buildup array and equation, you must return cursor back into the equation array (behind your equation, e.q. E=mc^2, but "inside" the equation array) and type # or keyword eqno<space>. After that cursor automatically move to the right side of math paragraph and you can type there some text or manual number for your equation! - so your equation is centered and the equation number is on the right side of paragraph :-) GOOD JOB FOR EXCEL, POWERPOINT AND ONENOTE!!! Unfortunately this manual equation numbering does not work in Word 2010 :-( Now, equation buildup engine in Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote is better (more powerful) than equation buildup engine in Word.Anonymous
November 25, 2009
The comment has been removedAnonymous
November 26, 2009
I think that this way of equation numbering is good enough (even very good) for using in PowerPoint Presentation and OneNote :-) Yes, I know that it is described in Section 3.21 of UTN#28 - I have known it for a long time, since I have used Word 2007 - but in Word 2007/2010 it does not work :-( And moreover I always tried this manual equation numbering without using "equation array structure" (only eqno alone), but unsuccesfully. But now I was very surprised when I see, that it works in Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote when I use equation array! :-) THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR THIS NICE AND IMPORTANT FEATURE!!! :-) It will be very useful in my school PowerPoint presentation. And I hope that one day you tell us step by step about all new "math" things implemented in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote in this blog :-) I look forward to the next version of Unicode Technical Note.Anonymous
December 02, 2009
Good enough reason to upgrade from office 2007 to office 2010 for me :)Anonymous
January 01, 2010
Many interesting keywords (commands) for (math-)font formating are available in PowerPoint 2010, Excel 2010, and OneNote 2010 :-) You can easy switch between regular, italic, bold, bold italic, sans serif, and typewriter symbols. Useful commands/macros are: Roman symbols rm or hbox or mathnor and mathrm (for "Normal Text") Italic symbols it or mathit or mit Bold symbols mathbf Bold italic symbols bit or mathbit Sans serif symbols mathsf Monospace symbols mathtt Script symbols mathscr or mathcal or sA, sa, sB, sb, sC, sc,..., sZ, sz Fraktur symbols mathfrak or fA, fa, fB, fb, fC, fc,..., fZ, fz Doubke-Struck symbols mathbb or bA, ba, bB, bb, bC, bc,..., bZ, bz Another interesting commands are: vmatrix, stackrel, char, displaystyle, textstylescriptstyle, scriptscriptstyle, text, fbox, mbox, and also eqno. Office 2010 has great support for math :-)Anonymous
February 05, 2010
The comment has been removedAnonymous
February 07, 2010
2010 office Word beta: Another suggestion for improved key action. When inside the editor, the CTL-A keystroke should select the entire equation. Currently, it selects the entire doc.Anonymous
May 14, 2010
Hi Murray, I am currently trying to create a streamlined solution for including math expressions in web content inside SharePoint. Currently our users do use Word for creating equations, etc. I know that I can have the users copy MathML to the clipboard and paste it into the source view of the SharePoint HTML Editor control, which will successfully render the equation in the browser. However, users will have to be able to re-import the equation into Word and work with it there as they complete their homework assignments. I can easily provide a "source" view of the MathML in SharePoint, so my question is, how do I go about importing the MathML XML back into Word??? Thanks! -Nick nickhaddow@cityu.eduAnonymous
June 16, 2010
Exciting stuff Murray, congratulations on getting it all into Office 14!Anonymous
July 01, 2010
The lack of proper equation numbering support is a real deal breaker - as has already been noted - it also seems such an obvious feature that its difficult to understand why it still has not been implemented. Other solutions such as using a 3 column table help, but are not robust enough (change the page layout and your equation numbers can disappear, problems with long equations etc.etc.Anonymous
January 16, 2011
The comment has been removedAnonymous
January 16, 2011
On the math ribbon go to Tools and click on the arrow in the lower right corner. This brings up a dialog that has a listbox with default display equation alignments. Choose Left.Anonymous
January 16, 2011
Thank you for your reply, and sorry for the missunderstanding (I described my problem incorrectly). I don't want to change the alignment of the displayed equation. I need to change the alignment of the last row of the text above the displayed equation. This text row should be aligned left, but the paragraph as a whole should be justified (Ctrl+J), and displayed equation (in the text paragraph) should be centered. Thank you.Anonymous
April 01, 2011
"[...] when the ODF file formats are used in Office 2010 applications, the math content is represented using MathML 2.0. " Is something I can't get working..Anonymous
October 23, 2011
Please, in Word 2010 math zone try to type e.g.: (y(x)=sin x)Ubar and you will see that the dot above the "i" disappears. The same result I get also for ubar. Please, could you change this behaviour in Office 15? Thank you.Anonymous
October 23, 2011
This is fixed in PowerPoint 2010 and OneNote 2010, but not in Word 2010. I'll try to get it fixed in the next version of Word. The work around is to put the dot back on the i using idot, but that's clearly inconvenient. The criterion as to when to suppress the dot can be a little tricky. For itilde, the dot should be suppressed, but should it be for (ij)tilde? PowerPoint 2010 and OneNote 2010 don't suppress it unless there's only single i or j inside the accent object. Then if you don't want the dots you have to use the special Unicode math alphabetics U+1D6A4 and U+1D6A5. You can also use these dotless versions in Word.Anonymous
February 26, 2012
Murray - you said, "There’s nice MathML import/export support, which is documented here (I’ll do a separate post about that documentation). In particular, when the ODF file formats are used in Office 2010 applications, the math content is represented using MathML 2.0. And you can copy MathML to/from math engines such as Mathematica and Maple." But the "here" link leads nowhere! and I can't find anything about how to export a formula from Word 2010 into pure MathML format. Is it just a regular simple copy/paste?Anonymous
February 26, 2012
One way to get MathML from Word is as plain text. For that on the equation ribbon, click on Tools and then choose the "Copy MathML to the clipboard as plain text" option. The selection has to select text in a math zone. Then you can paste the resulting MathML into, for example, NotePad. Alternatively you can look for the clipboard formats "MathML" and "MathML Presentation". Probably you can access these formats using Word's object model. I haven't tried this approach, though.