mathtype

[peterthebag]

Hi,
does anyone know what will happen with mathtype when office 2008
arrives?

Given the death of VBA, will we still have the same level of
intergration with word as we do now - the mathtype menu, and toolbar,
or has microsoft's decision to remove VBA broken that degree of
intergration? IF so, will a new approach to such intergration be
available via Applescript, or will we have to run mathtype as a
seperate app and paste equations into word docs?

cheers,

Pete

 

[Bob Mathews]

Peter,

Unfortunately we don't know the answer yet. Word 2008 isn't
available in beta, so we haven't had a chance to evaluate all the
possibilities. Microsoft's decision to drop VBA support is
regrettable. Regardless of the reasons they give for the
decision, it can only be for marketing reasons. Since Word 2008
isn't yet out in beta, we don't know whether we can replace the
MathType menu and toolbar. However, we expect the ability to
insert MathType equations into Word documents to be the same as
in previous versions. MathType and Equation Editor have always
been separate applications that use Word's OLE (Object Linking
and Embedding) interface which will be supported in Office 2008.

--
Bob Mathews
Director of Training
Design Science, Inc.
bobm at dessci.com
http://www.dessci.com/free.asp?free=news
FREE fully-functional 30-day evaluation of MathType 5
MathType, WebEQ, MathPlayer, MathFlow, Equation Editor, TeXaide

 

[peterthebag]

Bob,
many thanks for this. Two questions come to mind:

1. what marketing point could MS have for droping VBA?

It will only harm their own product - of course, it could be they are
affraid of the mac's growth in market share, and hope it will attract
more people to windows. Well, I dont think that is going to work for
them. They might get some people to move to win office on paralells
or crossover; however I think they will lose in the long run, given
the number of people who are saying they will stay with the mac, but
move to open office!

2. Given this, it might be time for a version of mathtype that works
with open office. Is this a posibility?

thanks,
Peter

 

[Bob Mathews]

Peter,

Answer numbers correspond to your question numbers:

1) There are three somewhat distinct uses for scripting: (a)
corporate IT depts using Office to deploy custom software
solutions, (b) independent software vendors seeking to add
functionality to Office (e.g., Design Science), and (c)
individual users seeking to automate some aspect of their work
within Office. Microsoft wants to use (a) as a way to lock
customers into Windows. While some people within an organization
may choose to use the Mac, and corporate networks must
accommodate them, they must always be 2nd-class citizens as far
as IT is concerned. Microsoft obviously doesn't care about (b),
as that is the other company's profit. It's a pretty small group
developing Office add-ins for the Mac anyway -- maybe just Design
Science.

2) OpenOffice has very little market share. As evidence, note
that most scientific journal publishers don't accept Oo
submissions. Many people hate Microsoft, so they want Oo to
succeed, but that doesn't make it popular. Also, it isn't a very
polished product and, as far as I know, doesn't have a practical
way to support an external math editor. You can use MathType with
Oo, for example, but the results aren't nearly as nice-looking as
they are with Word. Oo has nothing comparable to Microst's OLE
mechanism for inserting external objects into Office documents.

--
Bob Mathews
Director of Training
Design Science, Inc.
bobm at dessci.com
http://www.dessci.com/free.asp?free=news
FREE fully-functional 30-day evaluation of MathType 5
MathType, WebEQ, MathPlayer, MathFlow, Equation Editor, TeXaide

 

[peterthebag]

Bob,

thanks again. I look foward to seeing the new Mathtype.

cheers,

Peter

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Two questions come to mind:

1. what marketing point could MS have for droping VBA?

It will only harm their own product - of course, it could be they are
affraid of the mac's growth in market share, and hope it will attract
more people to windows.

The answer is far less sinister. MS has no need to be afraid of the
growth in Mac market share (at least at this point) - MacOffice is a
profitable product for the MS Mac Business Unit (MacBU), and newer Macs
can generate at least some sales of Windows. Besides, having successful
competition keeps the feds off their backs.

OTOH, sales of MacOffice would drop to nothing if instead of the
promised Office2008, MacBU couldn't release a new version prior to
Office2010. Which is what would happen if they had to update both Office
AND Mac VBA to a universal binary and Office2007 compatibility at the
same time. All VBA on Macs is VBA5, while WinVBA is version 6.x. The Mac
VBE is clunky and crippled compared to the Win VBE, and itself would be
a major undertaking.

In addition, MS has already announced that VBA likely will not be
supported in WinOffice after the next version, so spending all that time
and money to update MacVBA would likely STILL leave MacBU with a
marginal product and a huge development task, even if customers were
willing to hang around that long.

The decision is economic - MacBU has a profit target it must meet (like
any other unit at MS) - after all, MS shareholders are interested in
profit, not subsidies for Mac users. They can't meet that target if they
have to both update Office and VBA (MacBU's less than 200 people strong,
and they have had some trouble filling slots for highly skilled Mac
programmers already).

MacBU's forced to roll the dice on this release - we'll have to see
whether they're successful in providing enough value to Mac users to
overcome the lack of VBA. If they're successful, then I expect there
will be some reconvergence with WinOffice's programming options in the
release after Office2008. If not, most of us will likely be running
WinOffice.

Well, I dont think that is going to work for them. They might get
some people to move to win office on paralells or crossover; however
I think they will lose in the long run, given the number of people
who are saying they will stay with the mac, but move to open office!

Bob's answered this, and I'll just confirm that, with my larger Mac
clients, many of them have threatened to go to OO over the last few
years, but none have done so. NeoOffice has a pretty good Mac OO
implementation, and there are other options, but none of them meet the
needs of corporate users very well. Now the threat seems more to be to
go to running WinOffice via Parallels. That threat, while I'm not sure
that their Mac users will go for it, is at least credible...

 

[peterthebag]

J.E., thanks for this,

I do understand the economics of this, but I wish they had found a way
forward.
I am not an "MS basher" - although I use a mac, I love office 2004,
it's one of the best apps ever, anywhere. But I do have concerns for
the future.

They could perhaps, rather than make it universal now, have updated
the VBA and made other improvments in a way "consistant" with making
offfice universal later - savng time on making the apps universal
and using the time saved to keep VBA.

Now I know this would leave office 2008 still runnng on rosetta, but
roseta + VBA seems better to me that univiersal without VBA. I have
seen some people running 2004 on rosetta on an intel mac mini and it
seems to run OK. GIven that apple may improve rosetta's performance,
and macs are getting faster all the time, I don't know whether there
would have been a performance problem with 2008 on rosetta (of course
there may be much I don't know about this!). Althought undoutably MS
would have still had some stick for this, it could not be as bad as
some of the complaints i've seen people posting about the VBA.

All I can say is I hope very, very, much that you are right about
subsequent editions - hopefully the next version will have the same
VB.NET as winoffice.

I fear that this issue will do much harm to the sales of 2008. This
could be a bigger disaster than word 6 was! Pople will sick with 2004
I think. I just hope that if the 2008 sales are poor MS undersatnds
the reason why.

This probably would not be so much of a problem if users could see
that 2008 was merely an "interim" release between scripting
technologies. I think it would help so much if someone at Mac BU were
to clarify the long term plans - some confirmation of VB.NET for
office 2010 would go a long way towards reassuring people and calming
them down.

Here's hoping.

Peter

 

[JE McGimpsey]

This probably would not be so much of a problem if users could see
that 2008 was merely an "interim" release between scripting
technologies.

Well, my speculation about scripting technologies is just that:
speculation.

There's also one factor that I implied, but didn't make explicit. The
Return on Investment for VBA. Even if VBA could have been updated with
no delay to Office, the question remains as to whether the investment of
the millions of dollars would have been recouped in increased sales (or,
perhaps more to the point, would be less than the loss of sales due to
not upgrading VBA). I know MY clients will have to make a tough
decision, but they're my clients largely *because* they use VBA. They're
very likely not anything close to being representative of the overall
market.

You may be right: MacBU perhaps could have chosen to update VBA and
leave Office running via Rosetta. I suspect that was one option
considered and rejected - there's a significant danger to relying on
Rosetta for another three or four years, too, and it would have meant
much more incompatibility - can you imagine corporate clients
downgrading to .doc, .xls, etc., for another four years? I can't.

Besides which, I don't know how difficult the updating of VBA would have
been - and there still would have been significant incompatibility
between Win and Mac versions simply based on architecture.

I think it would help so much if someone at Mac BU were
to clarify the long term plans - some confirmation of VB.NET for
office 2010 would go a long way towards reassuring people and calming
them down.

Just for clarification: The "2010" speculation was my invention - I
don't really know how long it would have delayed the next version of
Office. Just that it would have put it past the window that MacBU found
acceptable for releasing an upgrade.

Who knows when the next version will come out (though it's likely to be
at LEAST 2010. And WHETHER a new version comes out will certainly depend
on how Office2008 sells.

 

[peterthebag]

I think that the latest 5 year agreement with MS lasts until 2010, so
given the 2-3 years between releases I think there should be one due
about then - although it may be called office 2011. I do think 2008
will sell less-well than MS would hope just because of this - but
given they will surely make money out of it scrapping it would be
unwise - the corect lesson would be to fix it.

If they did scrap office it would certainly open the door for someone
else (possible OO - whose office may be much more impressive in three
years, or maybe someone else). Faced with demands for spereadsheet
add -ins, etc., we may find such things produced for open office calc;
equation editing software providing tight integration for write, etc.,
etc., etc. In the absence of MS office, there will be a clear demand
for this.

Having integrated these "extras" with this mac software it must be a
distinct possibility that their vendors will say "OK, we have provided
this support for the mac version of this software, so we will make it
available to the windows version as well" (OK i'm assuming this is
technically possible, but i believe that OO, for example, uses the
same kind of "basic" on both platforms, so doing this may not be
difficult)

At which point that someone else may then take their improved programs
(with their add-ins, equation editors, etc) across to windows and
compete with MS there.

On this basis alone it would seem sensible for MS to keep mac users
using MS office. Making life easier for their competitors, and
sending their competitors customers would not be helpful to MS -
particulary when we already hear of city authorities, corporations,
etc., already looking at open source software.


I do suspect your speculations about future scripting are correct -
and logical. Either way, MS could diffuse the current level of user
concern with some comments as to their plans.

Peter

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Guys,

I feel I should jump into this fray, so here goes...

The answer is far less sinister. MS has no need to be afraid of the
growth in Mac market share (at least at this point) - MacOffice is a
profitable product for the MS Mac Business Unit (MacBU), and newer Macs
can generate at least some sales of Windows. Besides, having successful
competition keeps the feds off their backs.

OTOH, sales of MacOffice would drop to nothing if instead of the
promised Office2008, MacBU couldn't release a new version prior to
Office2010. Which is what would happen if they had to update both Office
AND Mac VBA to a universal binary and Office2007 compatibility at the
same time. All VBA on Macs is VBA5, while WinVBA is version 6.x. The Mac
VBE is clunky and crippled compared to the Win VBE, and itself would be
a major undertaking.

Well a new version is usually something help boost sales, but "new" without
being substantially "improved" usually results only in black eyes.

Why the fascination with a Universal Binary? PPC is strong but end-of-life
and it should be happy with Office 2004 - a superb product overall. IMHO
it's the best version of Office, Mac or Windows (including 2007) yet to hit
the market.

Remember Office v.X? Microsoft was going to make that "universal" for OS9
and OSX. Someone at MacBU had the brains to realize that focusing on OSX was
the smart thing to do. They were right! Where was that person this time?
Must have been away or something because it makes no sense to support PPC
for future Office. The next version of Office should have been Intel
optimized with real Intel-only binary bits for blazing speed and Leopard
optimized, not old code reworked to be dual binary IMHO.

The 2008 release would have been better if they had either stuck with
Rosetta and added some of the missing features you complained about (bring
VBA up to version 6 even if the VBE isn't as robust at least bring the
object model up to date). Or they should have dumped PPC altogether and
start from scratch and done it right. I would have loved it if they decided
to make 2008 in Rosetta a cross-platform compatibility improvement release:
better movie support, graphics, etc - you know the bugaboos. Who cares about
the Ribbon or whatever it morphs into? We already have contextual palettes
and they are superb. Why waste time on outmoded toolbars? Windows still
hasn't caught up to the palettes. Mac Office is years ahead.

In addition, MS has already announced that VBA likely will not be
supported in WinOffice after the next version, so spending all that time
and money to update MacVBA would likely STILL leave MacBU with a
marginal product and a huge development task, even if customers were
willing to hang around that long.

Yea, but the next version after 2007 won't be till 2009 or 2010 at the
earliest and you're talking about the one after that bringing the end of VBA
at the earliest 2011. That's 4 years minimum of complete incompatibility for
Mac Office beginning with 2008.

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Peter, I think you're on the right track. See in line...

-Jim

J.E., thanks for this,

I do understand the economics of this, but I wish they had found a way
forward.
I am not an "MS basher" - although I use a mac, I love office 2004,
it's one of the best apps ever, anywhere. But I do have concerns for
the future.

They could perhaps, rather than make it universal now, have updated
the VBA and made other improvments in a way "consistant" with making
offfice universal later - savng time on making the apps universal
and using the time saved to keep VBA.

I think MacBU wants to be the best, most Mac-like possible player in the
big-league Mac market. Steve Jobs has said that he would like the major apps
to all be dual binaries, so to fit in the the crowd they felt that dual
binary was the "right thing to do." My thought is that it was more right in
the political sense than a technical sense.

Now I know this would leave office 2008 still runnng on rosetta, but
roseta + VBA seems better to me that univiersal without VBA.

Me, too. But I don't think 2008 should support PPC at all - and that it
should include VBA.

All I can say is I hope very, very, much that you are right about
subsequent editions - hopefully the next version will have the same
VB.NET as winoffice.

Microsoft is making noises that make me think that everything will go into
the web browser (another recent web 2.0 fad that isn't the brightest idea
ever). Adobe's AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight are the contenders in the
ring. Google is already in the ring with gloves on ready to spar. OO is
100lbs overweight running around the sidelines in a g-string, smoking weed
and screaming "I want to fight, too!"

I see no indication from MacBU of any VBA or .NET support in the Mac Office
future. Then again, I think they have their hands full right now without
worrying about what will happen after Office 2008, so I'm not worried about
that now.

I fear that this issue will do much harm to the sales of 2008. This
could be a bigger disaster than word 6 was! Pople will sick with 2004
I think. I just hope that if the 2008 sales are poor MS undersatnds
the reason why.

I don't know who is the target market for no-VBA Office 2008. Education is a
tiny fraction of the Office market for Windows but it's a big chunk of the
Mac Office market. Without VBA we have no EndNote (Word), no TurningPoint
(PowerPoint), no MathType. That leaves Education with either 2004 Windows on
Macs (distasteful).

The small business market often depends upon at least some Excel macros, so
that market is at least partially lost. What's left is the home "consumer"
market - those who use email and an occasional word processor. I'll guess
it's probably the largest share of Mac office customers. I think MacBU is
hoping they will carry the day.

It's too soon to say whether 2008 will be a bigger disaster than Word 6 was.
I haven't seen 2008 yet. Maybe there will be a compelling new feature that
MacBU hasn't talked about. The ribbon? Ugh! A waste of screen space. There
are many people still using Word 5 toolbars. They will continue to use Word
5 toolbars. End of Story. Dual Binary? Costly to make, with the primary
benefit of perhaps some performance improvement for Intel users (especially
needed in PowerPoint).

In short, I think for a an unknown number of customers (especially Education
and business) Office 2008 simply is not an option. For them, the 2008
version will not exist. Obviously Microsoft does not think that the number
who won't upgrade is not substantial enough to hurt sales of Office 2008.
For their sake, I hope the projections (I presume and hope they are making)
are correct.

This probably would not be so much of a problem if users could see
that 2008 was merely an "interim" release between scripting
technologies. I think it would help so much if someone at Mac BU were
to clarify the long term plans - some confirmation of VB.NET for
office 2010 would go a long way towards reassuring people and calming
them down.

The MacBU folks must be pulling their hair out about now. Talk about a
series of bad timing. Apple's switch to Intel was like a punch in the gut.
Then Windows Office decided to go with XML file format (breaking Bill Gates'
1995 promise to never use a new file format in office).

And then there's Leopard.

So right now MacBU has several big tasks to complete:

Get the new XML file converters for Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2004 out the
door to restore lost compatibility with office 2007.

Leopard is a major OS update. Major OS updates mean big changes at the OS
level. Almost always that means applications that work now will stop
working. That means you can bet that almost every software developer
(including MacBU) is going to have re-work at least some things within their
apps for Leopard just to keep them going. Unless MacBU is extremely lucky
they will have to rework Office 2004 at least a little for Leopard, ETA
October. At the very least they will need to spend time and effort testing
Office 2004 in Leopard. Leopard without a fully functional Microsoft Office
2004 would be a bad thing for Microsoft and especially for Apple, which has
been riding a magic elevator lately.

Meanwhile the same people at MacBU are working to build Office 2008 and get
ready to market that - ETA December.

I wonder if there will be an ebullient bunch of MacBU folks at MacWorld 2008
rejoicing in the release of Office 2008 after a crushing year. I expect they
will be so worn out we'll need to carry them around the convention center.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I feel I should jump into this fray, so here goes...

I actually agree with almost everything you wrote, so would have made
very different decisions if I had been in charge of MacBU. (As you well
know!)

That said, I certainly don't have any of the internal info that MacBU
used to make those decisions, so I have to assume that, even though I
disagree with them, there were good reasons for them. Probably not good
enough to change *my* mind, but then, nobody asked me...

With all the people I've met from MacBU, I've yet to find even one that
is either stupid or intent on committing career suicide. That doesn't
prevent one from stupidly shooting oneself (I've done that to more than
one of my careers), but the decisions have been made long since, and
it's far too late to go back and change them.

Perhaps 2008 will bomb. Perhaps MS will then have to decide whether to
eat the cost of developing a next version, or shut down the MacBU.
Perhaps dropping VBA and focusing on UB will be the biggest mistake
since Microsoft Bob. But more informed heads than ours are betting
otherwise... I'm waiting skeptically.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Peter, I think you're on the right track. See in line...

Yep, me too, although I have couple of diverging points. Forgive me
snipping all context, but so many of us have had a say, I'm no longer
sure who was agreeing with whose points

Once you make an "Intel" decision UB is a no-brainer. More or less a
compiler switch. From the MacBU blogs, it looks like they had to jump
out of CodeWorrier into Xcode, which meant it was a more than usual
pain to leave VBA untouched. Xcode gives proper access to all the
current Apple tech, and CodeWorrier is near enough to dead, so to be a
"best" Apple product, they had little choice.

Since VBA is about to be canned in Windows, and Applescript will be
mildly useful forever, I think the MacBU made the right choice in not
including VBA this time round. It *will* be a pain for many of us, but
for many others, particularly in all-Mac shops, losing VBA and
partially replacing it with an improved Applescript will have some
aspects of welcome relief. Well, OK *I* hate VBA. Am I alone?

Finally, Rosetta is *not* good enough. I see only a slight speed
improvement on my quad Pro ‹ all tricked out with go faster graphics
and obscene quantities of memory ‹ compared with the Word performance
on this dinky little 12" G4 Powerbook. I was debugging a slightly
convoluted { IF "yadda..." } on the Pro yesterday. It was so slow to
respond to an alt-F9 I left it there and mowed the lawn, rather than
sink my fist into the monitor.

Rosetta's hopelessness is illustrated by Photoshop and InDesign CS3.
They absolutely fly now.
I'm really looking forward to Office 2008, just to get some speed out
of it.

 

[peterthebag]

Clearly there are some different views on the importance of universal,
but most people seem to think that losing VBA is a problem. I work in
education and could not live without some things - most noticably
mathtype - although excel add-ins (mac excel expander, etc) are
important to have access to as well.

Al I can hope is that - as someone from MS was saying - you can
replicate the VBA in applescript, and that vendors do so in order to
continue to provide some integration into word/excel.... If this does
not happen then i'd have to wait untill 2010/11/12 to see what that
version of office has to offer.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Clearly there are some different views on the importance of universal,
but most people seem to think that losing VBA is a problem. I work in
education and could not live without some things - most noticably
mathtype - although excel add-ins (mac excel expander, etc) are
important to have access to as well.

Al I can hope is that - as someone from MS was saying - you can
replicate the VBA in applescript, and that vendors do so in order to
continue to provide some integration into word/excel.... If this does
not happen then i'd have to wait untill 2010/11/12 to see what that
version of office has to offer.

Only time will tell if developers will spend the extra time and money it
takes to switch from VBA to AppleScript.

With VBA ver 5 existing VBA developers (there's a HUGE number of them) can
at least get by with their existing skills when they try to cross the
platform divide. Adding the necessity to use AppleScript adds yet another
road block for these folks. At best, it will take a LOT longer for MathType
and others to bring out 2008 versions.

The question that's on my mind now is, will Office 2004 work with Leopard?
October is only 8 weeks away. It would be reassuring to know that the day
Leopard is released that Office 2004 will have been thoroughly tested and is
fully functional. I don't recall hear even a peep about this from either
Apple or Microsoft.

Converters and 2008 are nice, but if I were in charge making sure that the
product doesn't die - even for a day - would be my #1 priority.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[alston]

Only time will tell if developers will spend the extra time and money it
takes to switch from VBA to AppleScript.

With VBA ver 5 existing VBA developers (there's a HUGE number of them) can
at least get by with their existing skills when they try to cross the
platform divide. Adding the necessity to use AppleScript adds yet another
road block for these folks. At best, it will take a LOT longer for MathType
and others to bring out 2008 versions.

The question that's on my mind now is, will Office 2004 work with Leopard?
October is only 8 weeks away. It would be reassuring to know that the day
Leopard is released that Office 2004 will have been thoroughly tested and is
fully functional. I don't recall hear even a peep about this from either
Apple or Microsoft.

Converters and 2008 are nice, but if I were in charge making sure that the
product doesn't die - even for a day - would be my #1 priority.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP infohttp://mvp.support.microsoft.com/

I will be very curiousto see if Office 2004 works with Leopard..
Another question <why did Apple stop suporrting Explorer Browser?
I'm particualrly upset as I purchased my IMAC G5 one week before the
Intel Duo processor was launched. Iwould have wited the week to get
the the duo processor as It is important to be able to run PC driven
programs from my MAC now I can't access information form my job as MAC
does not support Explorer!

 

[alston]

Yep, me too, although I have couple of diverging points. Forgive me
snipping all context, but so many of us have had a say, I'm no longer
sure who was agreeing with whose points

Once you make an "Intel" decision UB is a no-brainer. More or less a
compiler switch. From the MacBU blogs, it looks like they had to jump
out of CodeWorrier into Xcode, which meant it was a more than usual
pain to leave VBA untouched. Xcode gives proper access to all the
current Apple tech, and CodeWorrier is near enough to dead, so to be a
"best" Apple product, they had little choice.

Since VBA is about to be canned in Windows, and Applescript will be
mildly useful forever, I think the MacBU made the right choice in not
including VBA this time round. It *will* be a pain for many of us, but
for many others, particularly in all-Mac shops, losing VBA and
partially replacing it with an improved Applescript will have some
aspects of welcome relief. Well, OK *I* hate VBA. Am I alone?

Finally, Rosetta is *not* good enough. I see only a slight speed
improvement on my quad Pro ‹ all tricked out with go faster graphics
and obscene quantities of memory ‹ compared with the Word performance
on this dinky little 12" G4 Powerbook. I was debugging a slightly
convoluted { IF "yadda..." } on the Pro yesterday. It was so slow to
respond to an alt-F9 I left it there and mowed the lawn, rather than
sink my fist into the monitor.

Rosetta's hopelessness is illustrated by Photoshop and InDesign CS3.
They absolutely fly now.
I'm really looking forward to Office 2008, just to get some speed out
of it.

Elloitt ,thanks for your suggestions the fon't are lauching but for
some reason the font menu is corrupted ,emaning I have fonts
overlapping inthe drop down menu , everythime I open a document and
attempt to change the font the the application drops.
Thanks for your points aboutresetting the tool bars
AG

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Another question <why did Apple stop suporrting Explorer Browser?

Probably because MS dropped IE support years ago.

 

[Elliott Roper]

On Aug 1, 12:25 am, Elliott Roper <[email protected]> wrote:

Please excuse me for changing the title of this thread but it was
getting all over the place.

Elloitt ,thanks for your suggestions the fon't are lauching but for
some reason the font menu is corrupted ,emaning I have fonts
overlapping inthe drop down menu , everythime I open a document and
attempt to change the font the the application drops.
Thanks for your points aboutresetting the tool bars
AG

From this and your other posts, I'm reaching the conclusion that your
machine is a bit of a mess.

Is it an Intel Mac, and have you applied the quicktime 7.2 update from
Apple recently? What you see, and what some others had happen to them
after that update are different, but the timing is a bit of a worry. It
broke the Rosetta emulation on a few users' machines. Word's ancient
Power PC code has to be passed through Rosetta to run at all on an
Intel Mac. It is the wildest of all wild guesses to blame the Quicktime
update for the horrors you are seeing, but we might as well cover all
the possibilities.

You might also turn off WYSIWYG font and style preferences in Word's
preferences » general. Apart from the fact that it is downright ugly,
you can't navigate through it with the keyboard, and it might help
diagnose whatever problem you are having with fonts.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Bob:

You are correct: we don't KNOW yet

However, while you can't use a toolbar, I am certain you will be able to
create your own "Chunk" for Equation Editor, on the Ribbon.

That Chunk will appear automatically when an Equation receives focus.

Word 2008 may not call the device the "Ribbon", but it will have a
work-alike that behaves the same way. I will be surprised and disappointed
if it does not use the same code and resources as Word 2007, virtually
unchanged.

In Word 2007, a new chunk is simply a small XML addition to a .plist file.

Cheers

Peter,

Unfortunately we don't know the answer yet. Word 2008 isn't
available in beta, so we haven't had a chance to evaluate all the
possibilities. Microsoft's decision to drop VBA support is
regrettable. Regardless of the reasons they give for the
decision, it can only be for marketing reasons. Since Word 2008
isn't yet out in beta, we don't know whether we can replace the
MathType menu and toolbar. However, we expect the ability to
insert MathType equations into Word documents to be the same as
in previous versions. MathType and Equation Editor have always
been separate applications that use Word's OLE (Object Linking
and Embedding) interface which will be supported in Office 2008.

--
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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]