Equations have become “pictures” after an Auto-recovery in Microsoft Word 2002

The information in this document applies to:

Issue

If Microsoft Word 2002 shuts down unexpectedly while a document containing MathType equations is open and the document is “autorecovered” by Word, some or all of the MathType equations within the document can appear as pictures which are no longer editable in MathType.

Symptoms

1. Attempting to edit an equation by double-clicking on it will bring up the Format Picture dialog instead of MathType.

2. Copying and pasting the equation into a MathType window results in the error “The Clipboard contains no equation data”

Solutions

Equations which have been affected by the autorecovery process can be dealt with in a number of ways. The first is to leave the equations in their current state. Equations which have been autorecovered and appear as pictures will still display and print correctly without any modification. If the equations are correct and do not need to be edited, then they can be left in their current state.

If only a small number of equations need to be edited, it may be more expedient to simply delete those equations which need to be modified and recreate them in MathType.

The equations which have been affected can be recovered into an editable state by editing the document in a previous version of Microsoft Word. Either Microsoft Word 97 or 2000 can be used to recover the document by using the “Convert Equations” macro from the MathType menu in Word.

Steps to recover the corrupted equations

1. Open the document in Word 97 or 2000.

2.  From the MathType menu, select Convert Equations.

3. Choose the following settings in the Convert Equations dialog:
   Under “Equation Types to Convert”, select “MathType or Equation Editor Equations” and “Microsoft Word EQ Fields”
   Set the Range to “Whole Document”.

4. Click the “Convert” button to start the conversion process.

5. When the conversion is complete, a dialog will appear confirming the number of equations converted.

6. Save the document from Word.

7. The document and hopefully all equations should now be editable using any version of Word along with MathType. Note that sometimes this conversion method cannot recover all equations in an auto-recovered document. If this is the case, equations will have to be re-created and there is nothing MathType can do to auto-recover them.

Getting This Problem Addressed by Microsoft

We have passed the details of the problem, as well as sample documents, on to Microsoft, as only they can address this problem with Word. We encourage all users who experience this problem to report it to Microsoft so that they can appreciate the need to devote additional programming resources to addressing it. It is important that their customers continue to report their experience of this problem so that Microsoft can appreciate how widespread it is.

You can report this problem and any other problems you have about Word at:

Feedback regarding Microsoft Products

If you can contact their Technical Support Staff by telephone, your report will carry even more weight. You can contact Microsoft Technical Support at (800) 936-5700.