Microsoft Mathematics is a piece of software you might have never heard of, but can prove to be tremendously useful for your high school or college homework.

It is not advanced as a full blown suite like Matlab, but is definitely a step up to the Windows Calculator if you find it inadequate for your needs and don’t want to invest time to learn a new software.

The screen looks like a typical graphing calculator and a worksheet window to the right. The various sets of functions spanning calculus, trigonometry, statistics, linear algebra etc. ensure that a number of problems can be easily solved.

Microsoft had updated the software with the Ribbon interface in this fourth iteration. The options there allow you to easily switch between operations on real and complex numbers, radians and angles etc. Pen Input is also supported (but wasn’t something I could test properly owing to the lack of tablet PC)

A number of inbuilt tools make certain kinds of calculations easy to perform. The equation solver does exactly what it says. The formulas and equations drop down lets you work with some standard formulae of science, and lets you even plot them and see the variation with change in variables! The unit converter is pretty handy for converting values in different units in physics and engineering.

The insert tab lets you quickly insert matrices for linear algebra, a number of variables, and data sets for easy manipulation.

The graphing capabilities of the software are also impressive. Just switch from Worksheet mode to Graphing mode to get started. You can plot equations, data sets, inequalities and parametric equations. The most handy part is the graph control tool, which allows you to manipulate the graph variables. Graph display settings can be changed from the context-sensitive Format tab. The graph can also be exported as a picture.

Microsoft Mathematics also has a Word and OneNote add-in to seamless integrate a lot of the features into the respective documents.