Inserting equations into google docs - Equatio

Holy moly!  I have spent ridiculous amounts of time over the years trying to write professional-looking equations in my physics assignments.  Or often, I've spent enormous amounts of time simply scanning bad-looking handwritten equations.  Participants in my Purchase College AP Summer Institute last week showed me a wonderful computer and tablet app that seems to be a boon directly out of the star that I wished upon.

Take a look at Equatio.  It says it's free for teachers - I had to sign in with my google account, then it downloaded quickly and without trouble.  (My google account is through my school - no clue whether this will work with an unaffiliated personal account.)  

Then I went into google docs, where this toolbar sat at the bottom of the screen.  The toolbar gave me a couple of helpful hints, but was otherwise unobtrusive.  I tried typing the equation for the period of a pendulum.  "T =" was typeset in italics without fuss.  Then I wrote "2pi", at which point a menu came up asking if I wanted a capital or lowercase pi.  But I didn't even have to click!  The top choice was the more common lowercase pi, so I just hit enter to insert the  and move on.  

(Of course, I'm not using google docs right now - I'm in Blogger's "compose" window, where I don't have access to Equatio.  Nevertheless... I can copy and past the Equatio picture from docs into this window here.  As you can tell, the pi that I pasted is larger than I want.  But it's there!)

To get the square root symbol, I typed "root."  But I also typed "sqrt" to get the same thing!  And "sq" gives me a menu of options!  In other words, I don't have to remember arcane code, I don't have to click slowly through an enormous tableau of options... I just have to hint at the symbol I want, and lo, the symbol shows up.  Wow.

Typesetting the fraction was automatic - I typed "L/g" and I got a vertically set fraction with a horizontal fraction bar, all centered under the square root symbol.  Here's the final result:

I suppose I could nitpick and complain that the L is too high, too close to the top of the square root symbol.  So what.  I inserted this equation in barely more time than it takes to type a standard English word.  And the copy-paste function worked into MS Word, into this post, wherever.

I've been told (though I haven't yet tried) that on a tablet it can do handwriting recognition - that is, write the equation above, and the typeset version will magically appear.  

Your tests, at least, should look professional.  I don't mind sending out an in-class or homework assignment with handwritten items, with fifth generation bad xeroxing, with unaligned graphics that I literally copied and pasted to a page by hand.  I won't do that for a test, though.  A professional looking test is taken more seriously by your students.  So I've gone to great lengths to get professional looking equations.  Equatio has shortened those lengths.  Yay.