As many of you know, Mac Office 2008 lacks VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) support. This means that some of MathType's functionality within Word will not be available in the forthcoming (August) release of MathType for Mac 6.0. Microsoft has announced that they are going to bring back VBA in the next major release of Mac Office. Unfortunately, it appears that it won't happen before 2010. Better late than never! We explain the situation more fully on the MathType and Microsoft Office 2008 for Macintosh page.

Suppose you're writing a PowerPoint presentation to introduce function rules to your 6th grade math class. You'd like to be able to annotate an example equation with labels, but don't know how to do that.

There are so many reasons to annotate equations, and so many ways to do it that it's impossible to cover them all in a single page, but this new MathType Tip will show you how to add comments to your MathType equations in the most common scenarios.

If you find you're entering the same equation or term over and over again, or if you tend to use the same handful of symbols and templates, this tip will make those tasks faster and easier. It shows you how to create equations faster by dragging frequently used items to the MathType toolbar so they can be inserted later with just a click or a keystroke.

As a mathematician, you often use the operator symbols "much less than" and "much greater than" in MathType, and you wish there were a shortcut key for these symbols so you wouldn't have to choose them from the palette each time.

MathType has built-in keyboard shortcuts for most symbols, templates, and menu items. It also allows you to create shortcuts where none exists, and to change or delete the built-in shortcuts. This tip will show you how.