Word documents

The first thing to say is that any computer on which it is intended to install either of the Mathsguru Word Documents packages must, at a bare minimum, have installed a fully licensed copy of Microsoft Word. My recommendation is not to use any version earlier than Word 2003.

An alternative would be the freely available Open Office Suite which can load Word Documents - though I do not know how good this product is at converting such documents, especially those containing drawings or embedded charts etc?

The remainder of this page details some optional 'add-ins' and tools which will allow the user to get the most out of the Mathsguru Word Documents packages.

Optional additions.

Microsoft Excel :

Some of our documents include worksheets and charts embedded from Microsoft Excel. Having a copy of this software installed will allow you to edit these components. Of course, all editions of Microsoft Office come with both Word and Excel anyhow!

Equations :

Just about every document within the Mathsguru Word Documents packages have 'equations' embedded within them.

There are two issues here, namely; that your computer must have installed the necessary fonts to display these equations correctly (some will, some will not) and, secondly, you need to be able to edit these equations.

Now, whilst Microsoft Word comes with a basic 'equation editor', this optional add-in is not suitable for working with the majority of equations throughout the Mathsguru documents. Indeed this add-in will be unable to work with most such equations. Instead, you will need to download and install the trial version of MathType (or consider purchasing the full version).

This install will automatically upgrade Microsoft Word's equation editor and you will then be able to edit all equations in the Mathsguru Word Documents. Even when the trial version expires, you will be left with MathType-Lite which will still offer full editing capabilities.

Just as importantly, however, is the fact that installing MathType will install all the required fonts onto your machine. In particular it installs the 'Euclid Symbol' and 'Euclid Extra' fonts which are the ones required.

Graphs / charts :

Many of the more recent documents include graphs and charts embedded, not from Microsoft Excel, but from the freely available Graph System.

This is an excellent piece of software which you will need to download and install if you wish to edit the corresponding charts etc. Once installed, just double-click a chart within one of the documents and you will be editing it!

Additional information.

Please be aware that MS Word Documents rarely look identical on different computers because of things like different margin settings etc. Indeed, you may find, for example, that certain pages spill over whilst on my computer they are perfectly spaced!

This is inevitable really (and is why formats like PDF were invented to eliminate this kind of problem).

However, such issues are easy to resolve. Either try adjusting your page margins or scan through the pages inserting/removing carriage-returns as appropriate.

Many of my more recent documents use left/right margins of 2.5 cm and top/bottom margins of 1.75 cm. Setting your page margins to match these should reduce these problems with many of the documents.