There is the possibility of using one of the open-source versions, like openOffice, but those I guess also have their issues.
JPK -----Original Message----- From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Randy Read Sent: Monday, May 18, 2015 4:11 AM To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject: [ccp4bb] Equation Editor woes with Office 2011 for Mac Rather off-topic, but maybe someone on the list has found a way to work around this! There's a problem with the Equation Editor in Office 2011 for Mac (i.e. the one that is based on a stripped-down version of MathType, which you get with Insert->Object->Microsoft Equation). You can insert an equation, re-open it and edit it several times, and then suddenly (and seemingly randomly) the equation object will be replaced by a picture showing the equation, which can no longer be edited. I'm writing a rather equation-heavy paper at the moment, and this is driving me crazy. This seems to be a known bug, which has existed from the release of Office 2011. Apparently it happens, unpredictably, when an AutoSave copy of the document is saved, so you can avoid it by turning off the AutoSave feature. The last time this drove me crazy, several years ago, I did try turning off AutoSave. For a while, I was very good about manually saving frequently, but I got into bad habits and eventually Word crashed after I had worked for several hours on a grant proposal without manually saving. So I turned AutoSave back on. At the moment, the least-bad solution seems to be to turn off AutoSave while I'm working on a document with lots of equations and then (hopefully) remember to turn it back on after that document is finished. But it would be great if someone has come up with a better cure for this problem. No doubt someone will suggest switching from Word to LaTeX, but I need to be able to collaborate on paper-writing, and even though I might be willing to invest the effort in learning LaTeX, I can't really expect that of my collaborators. Most people in our field do use Microsoft Word, regardless of its failings. I've also tried using the professional version of MathType, but that requires your collaborators to install it as well - and I don't think that cured the equation to picture problem anyway. Thanks! ----- Randy J. Read Department of Haematology, University of Cambridge Cambridge Institute for Medical Research Tel: +44 1223 336500 Wellcome Trust/MRC Building Fax: +44 1223 336827 Hills Road E-mail: rj...@cam.ac.uk Cambridge CB2 0XY, U.K. www-structmed.cimr.cam.ac.uk
