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Article contributed by Suzanne S. Barnhill Word automatically converts text you type into fraction characters. Unless you have disabled the feature in Tools | AutoCorrect (Options) | AutoFormat As You Type, whenever you type 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4, Word substitutes the ¼, ½, or ¾ font character. These three characters are found in virtually all fonts, so this feature works reliably. Users often ask whether it is possible to get Word to “create” other fractions in a similar format. Well, yes and no. Font charactersThere are several ways to create fractions in Word, but only one of them will produce fractions in the same style as ¼, ½, and ¾. Luckily, if what you need fractions for is recipes, this way will suffice. As you can see from the screen shot below, many fonts include the characters for 1/3, 2/3, 1/8, 3/8, 5/8, and 7/8. These, along with ¼, ½, and ¾, should be all you need for typing most recipes.
Note for Mac users: Don’t expect to see a display like the one above in Word for the Mac. Although many Mac fonts contain at least the ¼, ½, and ¾ fractions, the MacRoman Character Set does not contain them, so there are no built-in keystrokes for the characters, and the Insert Symbol dialog in Word won’t show you the characters, because it is capable of showing only the characters present in the MacRoman character set. You have to look such characters up in the Character Palette (available only if you have OS X) or PopChar if you have it in OS 9. You have to display the Unicode keyboard (and get it to work…), then enter the character in hexadecimal. The fraction fonts mentioned below may be the only way you can access fraction glyphs; if you can’t justify purchase of special fonts, you will need to rely on one of the alternative methods described below. As shown above, these characters appear in the Number Forms subset of Unicode fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New. You can insert them from the Insert | Symbol dialog in Word 97 and above. In Word 2002, you can also insert them using the shortcut keys shown (such as 2153, Alt+X for 1/3) or shortcut keys that you assign. In Mac Word, you need a macro (available from the newsgroup) to insert Unicode characters. You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to them. If you want these fractions to behave the way ¼, ½, and ¾ do, however, you will need to create AutoCorrect entries from them (see “Exploiting AutoCorrect” for instructions on creating AutoCorrect entries). The easiest way to do this, of course, is to create AutoCorrect entries to replace 1/3, 2/3, etc., with the equivalent font characters. That is what most users will do. But users sometimes type dates in M/d or d/M format and don’t want the date for January 2 (or February 1) turned into ½. They therefore disable the AutoFormat As You Type feature to “Replace fractions (1/2) with fraction character (½).” If you are one of those users, then choose different trigger text for your AutoCorrect entries. You could, for example, use 1;3 instead of 1/3. Once you have set up AutoCorrect entries for all six of these extra fractions, you’ll be all set to type recipes. In addition to the fraction glyphs available in most Unicode fonts, you can purchase fonts that contain only fractions. For example, Adobe sells PostScript fraction fonts to match its New Century Schoolbook and Helvetica fonts. To use these, however, you would have to change fonts and insert the fraction characters using the Insert | Symbol dialog or a keyboard chart. Equation EditorAt the other end of the spectrum, if you need to create complex mathematical formulas such as the one below, you need Equation Editor or its big brother, MathType.
Equation Editor is supplied with all versions of Word but is not installed by default (in the Typical install), so you may need to rerun Setup to install it. To do this, Go to Control Panel | Add/Remove Programs, select Microsoft Office, and click the Change button. In the first page, select “Add or Remove Features.” On the next page, expand “Office Tools.” Select Equation Editor and set it to “Run from My Computer.” Click the Update button, and insert the Office CD when prompted. On the Mac, look on your Office CD for the application. Once Equation Editor is installed, you can use Insert | Object | Microsoft
Equation 3.0 to insert an equation object. If you’ll be doing a lot of this,
you’ll want to add an Equation Editor toolbar button ( The Equation Editor applet has its own Help file, and you can also find helpful tips at the Web site of Design Science, which supplies the application to Microsoft. If you need more features than EE offers, you can also download a trial version of MathType, of which Equation Editor is a cut-down version. If you decide not to purchase MathType at the end of the trial period, it will degrade into MathType Lite, a souped-up version of Equation Editor; you’ll still be able to edit the equations you created with MathType, and you’ll continue to have access to the full set of MathType fonts and symbols. Design Science also offers a tutorial on creating AutoCorrect entries from Equation Editor objects. EQ fieldsThe most universally useful way to create ad hoc fractions is with the EQ (Equation) field using the \f switch. This creates a fraction with a horizontal line between the numerator and the denominator. Here’s how to do it:
EQ \F(a,b)
{ EQ \F(1,16) }
For consistency, it is best not to mix fractions created this way with built-in font characters that use diagonal separators. In a document with varied fractions, use EQ fields even for 1/4, 1/2, and so on so that all the fractions will be uniform. Note that you are not limited to numbers in EQ fields. If you want to create fractions using words, you can do that, too. Suppose you wanted to represent a financial ratio such as the “acid test” (“quick ratio”):
To achieve this, you would create this field: { EQ \f (Current assets – Inventory,Current liabilities) } By default, the EQ \f field centers text above and below the division line, and the alignment switches available to some other EQ fields do not work for fractions. Text can be aligned manually, however, by adding spaces to the numerator or denominator as required. Formatted font charactersFor very large or unusual fractions, such as 1/10,000 or 23/250, an EQ field or Equation Editor object, which uses a horizontal separator, is appropriate and satisfactory. But for most common fractions, such as 1/6 or 1/9, users usually want what is called a “shilling” fraction, that is, one with a slanted separator, like the built-in ¼, ½, and ¾ font characters. There is no built-in way to create these, but you can simulate them with a little work. Here’s how:
Fractions created in this way may need some tweaking to look their best (experiment with the Spacing and Position settings on the Character Spacing tab of Format | Font). If you’ll be using specific ones frequently, you’ll want to save them as AutoCorrect entries. Also, it is best not to call attention to their failings by mixing them with the built-in font characters. If you will be using this method to create fractions for 1/6 and 1/9, say, do it for 1/4, 1/8, and so on as well so that all the fractions in your document will be uniform. Using a MacroFormer MVP Steve Hudson has written a macro that formats characters automatically. It is suitable for use after the text has been created, to automatically format all of the fractions found in document. You can get it here: http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1710219421 Fractions in running textWhenever you insert a fraction that is not a font character, whether you use an EQ field or a combination of superscript and subscript formatting, it is likely that your line spacing will be expanded to compensate for the extra height. If you do not want this to happen, you can either set the line spacing to an exact amount (Format | Paragraph: Line spacing: Exactly…), or you can check the Compatibility Option for “Don’t add extra space for raised/lowered characters” (Tools | Options | Compatibility). The latter will affect only cases where you have raised or lowered your superscript/subscript characters. For most Equation Editor objects and for text “fractions” such as the Acid Test example above, it is preferable to “display” the text by putting it in a separate, centered paragraph (as has been done in this article). |
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). Open Tools | Customize and select the Commands tab. In the Insert
category, scroll the Commands list till you find Equation Editor. Select the
command with your mouse and drag it to a toolbar (or the Insert menu).
