Handle the basic tools of Mathematica
1.1 Create a ‘notebook’
In order to start using Mathematica software, you first have to create the file you will be working on, which is called ‘notebook’. To create it, right click on the ‘New Document’ button and select ‘Notebook’.
The interface looks like this:
Once you enter the Notebook interface, you will see a ‘plus’ sign with a horizontal bar. This is called ‘Cell’. Every Notebook consists of one or multiple Cells that can be of various input (simple text, equations, pictures etc.).
In order to create a Cell, right click on the ‘plus’ sign to define its type.
To start with the simplest type, select ‘Other style of text’.
This tool enables you to insert some plain text in form of headlines, subtitles or simple paragraphs. In the following picture, the text is in ‘Title’ format.
Now press the down arrow key to exit this cell. You will see the plus sign and the horizontal line appear again, which means you can now create another cell.
*Important note: Everytime you want to exit the current cell and open a new one, press the down arrow key. For every new cell, you have to define its type, which you select by clicking on the plus sign.
Right click on the plus sign and select ‘Other Style of Text’.
Select ‘Text’ to define that the format of the text will be as a simple paragraph.
In this way you can create various types of cells that only contain text.
1.3. Change the type of a Cell
Once you define the type of the cell, you can even change it afterwards. All you have to do is go to ‘Format’ at the upper toolbar and select the new type you want your text to have.
For example the sentence ‘This is a tutorial for beginners in Mathematica.’ is in ‘Text’ format. Click on that Cell and go to the ‘Format’ button.
Once you select ‘Title’ the type of the Cell changes format.
If you want to edit or modify the text of a cell, it is possible to do so, simply by selecting the part of the text you want to modify.
From the Format tab you can make the text bold, italics and/or underline it.
You can also change the font color, by selecting ‘Text Color’ from the Format tab .
After editing the text, the result looks like this:
