Using Unicode and LaTeX in the Microsoft Equation Editor

hi today i am going to show you how to more efficiently use the equation editor that comes embedded in word my hope is that this will help you to more effectively and efficiently communicate your work um that has equations in it maybe you want to do homework and type it up you're writing a research paper and you want to embed your equations and um if you just kind of are using the equation editor through the graphical user interface only and just kind of clicking it can get incredibly um tedious but there are a lot of short hands that you can type in that will actually make it more efficient for you to use so uh we're going to click on our word document to jump right in anywhere it doesn't matter but wherever your cursor is that's where we will embed the equation editor so the hot keys to insert an equation are holding down the alt key and then the equal sign plus sign key at the same time so alt equal and it will pop up you see right there type equation here and now you can click inside that box and start typing so you see here right now it's set with unicode and i'll walk you through how we use it with unicode and then there's also a latex editor so i'm going to show you some latex syntax that also might be convenient for you and maybe hopefully um as an avid latex user i'm always promoting latex over word for any complicated documents certainly anything with math in it so this might make you feel a little bit more comfortable about jumping over to the tech all right um there are some other options here like ink equation where you can like use your stylus to write in the equation and then just kind of circle it will look at the syntax and kind of make the changes itself i'm not really a big fan of that one but it is available to you i'm not going to show you how to use it today all right so i'm going to just start typing and let's start with a simple equation y equals mx plus b that was really simple right didn't really require anything um but let's say i wanted to do another equation so now i want to say y equals x squared so if i do that i'm going to hit shift and then the 6 key with which gives me the carrot and then the two and that gives me the squared all right now let's try one other one y equals x sub 1 plus x sub 2. so to get the sub there i put in the underscore and then once you press space it makes it a subscript all right let's make some fractions let's do y equals a divided by b all right that's just the backslash key um which sits right next to the shift key where you have the question mark press enter and it will take care of that as well if you want to put false equal again parentheses or curly brackets around it um you can do something like this y equals and open bracket a divided by b close bracket and if you hit the space bar again it will expand the bracket um to make it fit the whole um uh fraction all right now what if we're wanting to greek letters we use a lot of greek in math so all to equal let's do so here all you need is the forward maybe this is the backslash i always confuse it it's the one right above the enter key um and then start typing out your um greek letters so if you want a lowercase alpha you'll type alpha in all lower case and you'll leave the first letter lowercase and it'll be an alpha and let's say beta gamma

epsilon and so on right throughout the greek alphabet theta that's a good one we use a lot rho all right if you want them to be upper case like for example delta we like as an upper case right then just make the first letter uppercase and it will make it the uppercase greek letter if you're not sure of what the unicode syntax is uh you can hover over for example here with the partial differential when i hover over it will give you the unicode syntax so if i want to say partial x by partial there you go all right another good one to know is the equivalent which gives you the three the triple equal sign need both a superscript and a subscript so for example x squared underscore a okay um and or you can do x underscore a carrot to either order and just being able to type it in as opposed to like clicking around for it i think can be super helpful all right let's go into latex so over here i've now changed how we're going to type it using latex so now we're going to work in latex so alt equal i'm going to select latex if you haven't selected it already and here we're going to write in latex syntax which has a lot of overlap with um with the unicode so but here for fraction we're going to do backslash frac a over b okay and then press enter and that's gonna then flip it and turn it into a fraction if we do um alpha for example hit enter you're going to get your alpha so basically what's going to happen here is if we're writing a large equation um let's see y equals if you want to do multiple things in your subscript create a curly bracket to put it all in so let's do just making up an equation and we hit enter and it's all there ready for us so you would type it all in the latex syntax it wouldn't like with the unicode where as soon as you press the spacebar it would automatically reformat into the appropriate visual way of looking at an equation you would only see it after you kind of typed it all in which you know you might find more convenient okay so now i'm going to show you how to do some integrals using latex so here you don't have to but i'm just going to for completeness y equals backslash int underscore we're going to then open curly brackets and put in our bottom limit of integration here i'm just going to call it a close curly brackets to put the top limit of integration we're going to use the carrot so shift 6 and then type in our top limit of integration space x squared comma dx and comma does not need to be there so just space dx all right so now i'm going to show you how to do a summation so here y equals to start your summation it's going to be the backslash sum underscore just like you did with the integral open curly brackets to start what goes at the bottom of the summation so here

we're going to say n equals zero it usually does have an equal sign here usually like setting your variable for the summation and then to put what you're putting on the top um of the summation we're going to use the carrot again and here we're going to put infinity so it's backslash i n f t y space and here we're going to say x to the n and then press enter and here we go so a good resource for um doing more of these right like maybe you want to do matrices and things like that is a sea tan so the resource that i use is this latex math for undergrads it's really comprehensive and as you can see a lot of your syntax is really going to match the syntax for unicodes really just depends on what you're comfortable with and how you feel like you want to write but doing this can really speed up um your typing and really make things efficient for you so i encourage you to um take a look i will add the link to that latex math for undergrads to the description so you can have it available for you and don't forget to like and subscribe