Hi Randy, although learning Latex as a whole can for sure be time-consuming, an alternative solution is to use a Latex equation editor like Latexit. You just have to learn the (easy) equation syntax and then you can drag and drop the formatted result into Word or Page, it's rock solid :

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/17889/latexit

Hope that helps,

Nicolas

Le 18/05/15 09:10, Randy Read a écrit :
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: 
[email protected]
Cambridge CB2 0XY, U.K.                               
www-structmed.cimr.cam.ac.uk


--
Nicolas Soler
Roger Williams group, PNAC
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Francis Crick Avenue
Cambridge CB2 0QH
United Kingdom
phone : +44(0) 1223 26 76 20
mail : [email protected]

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