Hi Randy,
It's not ideal, but until the bug gets fixed or there's a more elegant
solution, could you just set up your own autosave?
It'd mean opening a terminal and running a command before starting, but if you
had a little script like the below running while you were working you'd at
least ensure you wouldn't lose too much work if something crashed:
#!/bin/bash
[[ $# -ne 1 ]] && echo "Usage: $0 <path_to_file>" && exit 1
while true;
do
cp $1 ${1}.bak
sleep 60
done
Best wishes,
Jens
________________________________________
From: CCP4 bulletin board [CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] on behalf of Randy Read
[rj...@cam.ac.uk]
Sent: 18 May 2015 09:10
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
