Author Archives: southamptonexamfactory

add a commonly-used table

I watched my colleague Alun Dear laboriously make a bond energy table from scratch, with column headings centralised in bold but the bonds justified left. I realised that every time he made a table for one of his wonderful resources he had to go through the same process every time. ‘Why don’t you just saveContinue reading “add a commonly-used table”

change the format of a question to AQA-style

Here at Southampton Exam Factory we do AQA at GCSE. The style of questions is that the marks for a question are at the end of the question, not the student’s answer, and the students write on solid lines: We take questions from other exam boards and modify them to make them fit our syllabus.Continue reading “change the format of a question to AQA-style”

add powers to a maths equation no.2

The macro below will produce the powers in a maths equation by making the powers size 8 and raising them by 2 points. To do this, put a ‘z’ in front of anything you want to be a power. For anything that you want to be a subscript put a ‘q’ in front of itContinue reading “add powers to a maths equation no.2”

the Arrhenius equation

In the Arrhenius equation the activation energy has a subscript but is itself a superscript: The best way to write it in Arial font size 11 is to have the exponential factor raised by 2 points but the small ‘a’ in size 8 and raised by only 1 point. The first code below will writeContinue reading “the Arrhenius equation”

delete all headers and footers

Here at Southampton Exam Factory we have a lot of resources from an exam board for a now-defunct specification. The resources all have several footers and headers in gaudy textboxes with logos. Nobody cares now which section of the defunct syllabus the resources were created for. The macro below will remove them all with oneContinue reading “delete all headers and footers”

add batch AutoCorrect entries

As explained here, AutoCorrect can be used to type in unformatted chemical formulae which then automatically add the correct subscripts and superscripts, or to type in an abbreviation which automatically expands to the long word or phrase. But it takes a long time to add each entry individually. The link below is to a fileContinue reading “add batch AutoCorrect entries”

add powers to a maths equation

When you make an equation using Insert>Equation you can’t use superscripts to get the powers. If you try to make the powers in a smaller font it just makes the whole expression into the smaller font. My colleague Lara Dune asked me how I produce such beautiful script as: I used to place the expressionContinue reading “add powers to a maths equation”

find the Unicode value of a symbol

As described here, Aula Nerd often wants to know the Unicode value of a symbol. Pressing Alt + X after the symbol will give the Unicode (hex) value. The macro below will give the Unicode (decimal) value – just highlight the symbol you want then click the macro: If you then want to use theContinue reading “find the Unicode value of a symbol”

add a double bond

Are you still using an equals sign for a double bond? Here at Southampton Exam Factory we use Unicode (hex) symbol 268C which produces this: I use AutoCorrect as detailed here to add my double bond: typing dbz AutoCorrects to the nice double bond. See here for how to find the Unicode symbol for the double bondContinue reading “add a double bond”