There are folks who are able to see maths equations in their head and they are able to simply write down the basic figures they require in order to bring the answer into focus, or the answer itself. Tesla was the radio technology inventor, could perform complex calculus in his head and was awarded a fail grade at school because he simply was not able to work it out any other way; in other words, not on paper.

Today many folks have been revealed to be visual and they require to visualize the task on screen (or on paper) in order to obtain a complete grasp on the equation and for rendering the answer correctly. With Microsoft's WYSIWYG Equation Editor this is now significantly facilitated.

Microsoft's Wysiwyg Equation Editor was developed and has been included in all MS Office 2007 and higher suites and it's been designed as a WYSIWYG editor (meaning "what you see is what you get"). It permits the user to generate calculations in a completely visual way. In fact, it is a real-time calculator in addition to a graphics tool which can additionally be applied for a wide range of other applications as well.

For example, if you are creating an equation, you may move the equation to another application by using the XML markup language which is included in the control. The control may additionally be embedded by using an OLE embedded object feature on supported applications.

This makes this a dynamic editor that can become quite useful in many mathematical applications, as well as working with programs to generate a calculation formula of something dependent on this to function, there by adding functionality to the program that would have otherwise taken more coding to pull off.

An important application that I have seen for this WYSIWYG Equation Editor is in formulation sciences and chemistry. This allows the user to build and save their equations in pretty much the same sort of way you would write them out on a school room chalk board, then turning the board over to save the equation while you work on another one.

Using this format it is possible to save your work digitally and then port it to programs and even export it to a website page if you want. In essence it is an advanced visual calculator with built-in extra functions.