At the end of every traveling workshop I do, I like to do 30 minutes on using an Equation Editor. Everyone thinks they “know” how to use one. There’s not anything they can be taught. It’s one of the more fun sessions to do simply because everyone discovers something they didn’t know before. And it always would have saved them a lot of time.
One of the participants came up to me afterwards and confessed that he had written 150 pages of math text and he could’ve done it in half the time if he had learned these tips first. Several participants asked what they should be doing with all the free time they will have since typing their tests won’t take as long now (of course, they should be looking for some great interactive math stuff on the Internet with that extra time!).
Anyways, back in my hotel room that night, I again found myself wondering why the heck MathType doesn’t post video tutorials. Then I remembered that I actually have a set of tutorials that I recorded for the faculty on my campus.
Disclaimer: These videos are not great quality. They were some of the very first videos I ever recorded with Camtasia. The clicking sound is annoying (I figured that out later, but can’t remove it). And I’m really not compelled to re-record these because, well, it’s not my job!
However, as one last Bon Voyage gift to my readers, I’ve reproduced them so that I could post the tutorials on YouTube.
If you use equation editor or MathType, no matter how well you think you know how to use these, do yourself a favor and take 30 minutes to watch the videos. For 99.9% of you, it will save you far more than 30 minutes of time in the future. (the other 0.1% actually took the time to read all the MathType help files or have been to one of my MathType workshops)
MathType Tutorial: Creating the Ctrl-E Hotkey (for easily opening & closing equations)
MathType Tutorial: Using Hotkeys Part 1
MathType Tutorial: Using Hotkeys Part 2
MathType Tutorial: Formatting Equations and Alignment
MathType Tutorial: Tables and Formatting
MathType Tutorial: Formatting All the Equations in a Document
Just for the record, I could make much better videos today and I would actually add quite a few more tips (like nudging, Lewis Dot Diagrams, and miscellaneous other tips). But given that I’m in a time crunch, and there are many, many other things I should be doing right now, this is what you’re getting (my C-level video performances).
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