After bringing up the palette, click on the square root symbol. A radical symbol with a square box appears on your notebook command line. Click on the square box within the Radical and enter 5. Move cursor to right of that symbol and left click again. Then add two forward slashes and an N. Execute command. I copied that operation out of my notebook to place in this message. When I paste results from the copy, rather than showing the square root Radical sign, Sqrt[5] is displayed. In the notebook a 5 is shown within the square root Radical sign.

In[1]:= Sqrt[5] // N

Out[1]= 2.23607

Thanks I am working from a Mathcad tutorial program Study Works and trying to reproduce it in Mathematica.

One thing I noticed if I type into the search box Enter fractions, it never gives me the type fractions Help sheet! Somebody might want to add that. The other thing is I am trying to learn the shortcuts for the different mathematical apparatuses. Pi, Sqrt. I'll try the meun palette this time round.

There is a tutorial on typing fractions: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/TypingFractions.html Also, have you tried the Basic Math Assistant palette?