Hi Randy, You could try the beta version of the forthcoming version of Word and see if the bug is fixed. Obviously, it is a beta version and therefore a bit risky but it installs along side the current version and I’ve been trying it on my laptop without issue so far. One improvement for me is that this version of Word now uses the Mac’s in built special character palette and we use a lot of Greek characters. This works a lot better than symbol browser in the current version of Word where we still see some of the greek characters getting screwed up when saving as PDF or sharing with a Window’s PC. One thing to watch is that the beta version .docx format has changed so you should be careful to save as compatible with Office 2011.
https://products.office.com/en-us/mac/mac-preview <https://products.office.com/en-us/mac/mac-preview> Regards MGM Martin G Montgomery ATP Synthase Group MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit Wellcome Trust/MRC Building Cambridge Biomedical Campus Hills Road Cambridge Great Britain CB2 0XY www.mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk > On 18 May 2015, at 09:10, Randy Read <rj...@cam.ac.uk> wrote: > > 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
