I’ve had a chance to use Office 2007 for the paper that I’m writing. The journal I’m submitting to somehow expects it to be “typeset” in Word, which is an interesting exercise in futility.

But I like Office 2007. I’m not 100% sure, but it seems that the equation editor has been revamped, although it’s been years since I’ve had to use it. For the limited use I put it through this time round, it seems to be doing a semi-reasonable job at typesetting the equations, although inputting them is still something I’m glad I don’t have to frequently do.

And Office 2007 has a built in citation manager! That made me quite happy to see, although I’m still having a lot of teething-pain with it. For instance, I often land up with author surnames and first names switched around, even when I’m using their built in “edit name” tool that has separate fields for adding first name, middle name and surname. It also doesn’t completely handle citation styles, like how to cite page numbers and so on: it just lets the user add arbitrary “page number” text to the citation; nor does it let you easily add text to a citation (such as Ackermann, 1998), or combine multiple citations into one entry. Gah! Maybe I’m just missing something. It also, sometimes, in what appears to be an arbitrary decision, adds the document’s title to the actual, in-text citation — I have never seen that done in anything except footnote citation styles (which I am not using), and I have no idea why Office feels that this “feature” is something that an author would automatically want. And while I can thankfully use unicode characters in the citations, I don’t seem able to use different font faces, such as italics, which you do actually need when, for instance, an article name contains the name of a species (specific names being written in italics, such as Homo sapiens).

Anyway, I like it, although typesetting a large document in it is probably still a nightmare. Trying to easily deal with the various styles, indenting and so on, even in a 25 page document, is an irritating hassle, and I’m not sure I want to deal with over a hundred references in its citation manager — I’m also pretty sure that there’s no way to use those citations in a sensible, non-mechanical way that isn’t going to drive someone insane in the long run.

Paper progress: it’s now down to 25 pages, and all the citations have been added. I just need to fix up the tables and then I can send it off to the other authors.