I found tutorials for Microsoft Math 3.0 on Microsoft Downloads and felt compelled to view one. What I discovered was one of the coolest graphing programs I’ve ever witnessed.

You just enter an equation into it, and it will graph it for you. Back on the worksheet tab, it not only solves equations, it will tell you how to solve them step by step!

This makes me tempted to go dig up my calculus books for problems that were tough to solve, and see how Microsoft Math handles it.

This thing has so many features to it, check out the demos! Best of all, it’s only 20 bucks (and sadly it’s not available in my MSDN subscription).

Time for criticism: what is the deal with the funky cell phone looking thing? Was that really necessary? The inner window of it already looks like an outlook ribbon… why not take it all the way there? The 3-d graph could work better too: rotation and zoom is clunky.

Microsoft Math runs on .NET 2.0. It would have been really nice if it ran on 4 and used MEF so I could write plug-ins. Please Microsoft Math team, open this up for extensibility.

If you’re in school, taking night classes, or just a geek like me, this is a pretty handy program to have. It sure beats Windows Calculator. The price is right, and there’s a 30-day trial if you just want to play around with it.