Showing repeating decimals in Word

October 10, 2008 · 1 min read

Not very amazing or technical but thought I'd post a bit about it anyways. Anyone that gets asked how to show a repeating decimal in Word, for example representing the fraction 1/3 in decimal is 1.33333333  with 3 repeating to infinity.  Normally there would be a line above the last 3 (the line is called a vinculum).  

Now to show the 3 with a line above it in Microsoft Word you need to use a field code that superimposes one character over the other.

Press Ctrl-F9 to insert the field delimiters then within the field code type

EQ \O(3,¯)

Now the parts of that are:

EQ - creates a scientific equation
\O  - indicates to overstrike each successive element over the previous one
(3,¯)  - the characters in the order to draw/type them on screen. Replace with whatever you want to combine, for example zero and a slash (0,/)

Maybe Prince was playing around with this feature when he changed his name to a symbol?

For a more detailed guide complete with screen grabs see Suzanne's posting in the list below.

Links:
Definition of repeating decimals
How to create overbars by Word MVP Suzanne Barnhill

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Jason Row

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