Some Journals Rejecting Office 2007 Format

hormiga writes "Some scholarly journals are rejecting submissions made using new Office 2007 formats. Science and Nature are among publishers unwilling to deal with incompatibilities in the new formats, and recommend using older versions of Office or converting to older formats before submission. The new equation editor is cited as a specific problem. Rob Wier recommends that those publishers consider using ODF instead."

It's always a surprise

[l2718]

That journals accept anything but TeX/LaTeX. Of course some still accept typewritten documents (with a transcription fee), but if you have access to a computer why use Word (or OO writer) for serious writing?

Re:you mean they even take office?

[Alan Shutko]

There are a few reasons that Science and Nature prefer Word to TeX. First, they are not nearly as equation-heavy as a pure physics or mathematics journal would be. Second, they've got a publishing workflow that takes Word as an input and ties into the rest of their technology. They don't care how well Word typesets documents, they want common input formats that they can rip information out of and edit themselves.

TeX and LaTeX are great if you've got substantial finicky needs (esp around equations) that you really need the author to get right, and to be able to carry that through. However, to support that comes at a price. As the TUGBoat editors experience on an ongoing basis, publishing a journal composed of arbitrary TeX content from different authors is difficult. Different authors may use conflicting macro packages, or it may be harder to coerce each into the house style.

Too hard to install the compatibility pack?

[pcsmith811]

There is a compatibility pack for Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. Maybe they should research that!

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA10168 6761033.aspx [microsoft.com]

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[dal20402]

I'm not in a scientific field, but I am on the staff of a scholarly journal.

In my field, people don't even think about format. If you say "submit a paper," it's just assumed it will be in Word format. What's more, many scholarly papers are sufficiently complex that incompatibilities arise if you try to use OpenOffice or a variant to create those Word documents. If you are submitting a final product for something like a class, you can get around this by providing a PDF, but as journal articles face a lengthy editing process an editable format is required for submissions to journals.

If you asked our scholars for ODF, TeX, or anything else other than Word, they wouldn't even understand what you meant. If you are going to write something, you write it in Word, and hit "Save," and that's how things are written. You'd be amazed how many people ask me how I generate those weird PDFs... even though, if you have Adobe Reader installed, there is a PDF button in your Word toolbar. (And the people using Macs have a "PDF" button in the Print dialog box.)

I hate Word with a passion, although I've never used Word 2007, because it thinks it's smarter than me. (As OpenOffice so slavishly tries to imitate Word I have some of the same problems with it.) I'd use something else if it were remotely possible. But it's just... not, at least in my field.

Re:Doc Formats?

[bh_doc]

Knowledge of TeX/LaTeX is pretty much a prerequisite in the Maths and Physical Sciences. I'm not so surprised that a CS major missed out. No disrespect, one of my majors was CS, too. It depends on what you typically write, but once you learn LaTeX you might find it hugley more sensible than any WYSIWYG system. I did.

Re:Doc Formats?

[coaxial]

LaTeX generates both Postscript and PDF. I don't know anyone who would submit or accept raw LaTeX source. All the journals I've looked at took either .doc or PDF, with the expressed requirement that it be "a single, self-contained file." You don't get that with LaTeX. Unless you're a masochist, all your references are in BibTeX, and all your graphs are in either PDF or EPS format, not that weird line-draw TeX command thing.

Re:How strange

[dal20402]

Word has only changed file formats once in recent memory, between Word 95 and 97 (or 6.0 and 98 in the Mac versions).

I remember exactly the same issues that time. Word 97 .doc format was not widely accepted until at least 1999. Once Vista and Office 2007 are widely adopted, which will occur within a three-year replacement cycle, and Office 2008 for Mac is well established, the new formats will become standard and there will no longer be a peep of protest, whether or not MS has fixed the issues with the formats.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[ceoyoyo]

PDF. I've never submitted a paper in anything else. I didn't actually realize that big journals would take DOC either.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[larry bagina]

Science and Nature are more about biological/geological/cellular/laboratory science. "Math" mean statistics and some charts and graphs.

So use Lyx

[shis-ka-bob]

Lyx allows you to write TeX without having to learn all the funny commands. It's just like how you can use KOffice to write ODF documents or MS Office 2007 to write OOXML documents ;-) There are other LaTeX front ends that allow you to generate documents without having to learn all the tags, but I like Lyx and its free.

Re:Doc Formats? -- Counter-example

[beanyk]

I submit to some physics journals (Physical Review D, for example). They -prefer- LaTeX source with .eps figures. Though I use BibTeX with an external .bib database for references, I explicitly cut-and-paste the contents of the resulting .bbl file into the main paper draft.

I -think- they'll allow PDF or postscript submission of the whole thing, but it's slower to process, and they might add charges.

MS Office Compatibility Pack

[antdude]

For those with older Office (2000 to 2003), why not use the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack [microsoft.com] for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats? I have not run into any 2007 files yet since I still use 2000, but at least I am ready if any appear.

RTFA, please

[shis-ka-bob]

The point is that they did try and it turns out that Word 2007 screws up the math, even if you save the results in Office 2003 formats. As it turns out, mathematics is the language of Science and Nature. So, while many of us can go thought life without ever writing a contour integral, most of us will never be published in Science or Nature either (the closest I got was Physical Review Letters). Unless you want to assure us that you can handle complex math expressions with you free patches, I would suggest that you have a bit more respect for the staff of Science and Nature. They are reacting to a observed problem. I'll bet you that they tried the free patches before they decided to warn scientists all over the world about submitting articles using Word 2007.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[beyondkaoru]

computer literacy aside, i've noticed that a ton of math and science academics know how to use latex really nicely, even if they don't know much about computers. it makes sense if you're doing a lot of equations/formulas and they need to be legible.

Re:How strange

[JuliaNZ]

What do you think might have given some of the publishers a backbone?

If you read the article you'll see it's because Office 2007 fucks up equations and some Greek characters, and documents can't be further revised or published in the journals after they've passed through this version of Office. It's not an ideological battle, it's that the software doesn't allow them to publish those papers properly.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Otter]

99.9+% of life science researchers have never even heard of TeX. Even in math-heavy sub-fields, it's rare. Word is overwhelmingly the standard. My limited experience in working with chemists is the same.

Maybe in physics and math TeX is the norm, but nowhere else.

Re:about my sig

[The Bungi]

None of this really matters because M$ is failing. Vista is a flop. No one wants it.

Why yes, just yesterday you were telling us [slashdot.org] how everyone is going broke because of "M$". You never did get back to dedazo on that one, did you? I wonder why not.

To the OP, all you need to do is look in twitter's posting history. Right now there's a jewel there where he explains how "Windoze is teh shit". Powerful stuff. There's lots of reference material [slashdot.org] out there [slashdot.org]. My personal favorite is this one [slashdot.org], by far. Captures his je ne sais quoi very well.

I am glad someone brought this up

[semiotec]

although it'd be nice if Slashdot editors can be bothered to spell his name correctly. Many posts so far express some surprise that journals even accept anything other than Latex. Having been through the system several times, I can say that the reason that big journals like Science and Nature accept MS docs as the default format is because of biologists. Essentially, Latex is used only in Mathematics and Physics related sciences. Unlike them, most biologists don't know much about computers, and couldn't really give a rat's arse about the formats. Having trained in Physics (Bachelor) and Med/Bio (PhD) and now working in bioinformatics, I have had many arguments with people about this particular issue. My argument being that, the fact that the scientific process is an open process should also mean that the format in which the data are preserved should also be open, and not locked in some proprietary format like MS Doc and, yes, shock-and-horror, Powerpoint files. I've bitched many times to my old boss that he was spending a few thousand dollars on getting Photoshop licenses just to crop some pictures or change the levels. Although the lack of proper CYMK support in GIMP is a bit of a setback, but even then, just a couple licenses would have been sufficient for that purpose, rather than getting a license for every machine. I mean, these guys were using Photoshop as an image _viewer_! The situation in Physics is quite diffferent. Of course there are many hardcore OSS users, but many people just used BSD/Linux/(and even some old Unix machines are still chugging along), simply because they are free and they are sometimes also the best tools for the job. I remember in a few years ago working with an Astrophysics group during a summer vacation, and we had some time on the Parkes telescope, and we were able to remotely control the telescope from Sydney, which would have been impossible under MS Windows (at the time). Back to the point, ODF would hopefully bridge this difference, since if the biological scientists want to learn Latex, a WYSIWYG editor using ODF (such as OpenOffice.org) should be acceptable to them.

Different scientist.

[DrYak]

Using TeX is standard practice for physics and math papers.

The difference is that people writing in those papres, id est Physicist and Mathematicians, are very well versed in informatics. Most of them have at least some basic knowledge of Unices, and at least do program in Mathlab and a little bit in Fortran.

They can understand what TeX is, and given the quantity of formulae they have to work with, they understand the advantages that TeX has to offer regarding them.

Why is it that Nature (not sure about Science) does not accept TeX documents? DOC? Why? It's probably the fault of the biologists. Silly biologists.

Nature is much more about life science. In those field you can find scientist which are way much more dexterous in manipulating micropipettes than computers. Most of them see computers as things that just have to work. They fire it up and use the mail client (Outlook express. Thunderbird is you have luck), browse a little bit (Internet Explorer or Firefox depending on the university) to find papres that they won't read on screen anyway but print on paper, and write with a word processor (i.e.: Word). They only time they write with anything else is... when they fire up PowerPoint to prepare a poster (Yes. There are tons of people abusing Powerpoint to do posters instead of using a proper publishing tools).
The couple of them who feel enlightened and feel the urge to be different than the mass of sheeps, they buy Macs and install "Microsoft Office for Mac" on them.

Most of them don't realise that there other thing besides Word to handle text documents. And they all feel too much accustomed to Word to switch to anything else. They are the people who are upset when universities try to push for OpenOffice.org, because, they say, University should prepare their student to be proficient with tools that they will encounter later in professional life, and Word is what those student will find (as if being proficient with word processing in general was much different than learning Word down to the button position and being completely lost each time microsoft decides to change the layout for each new generation).

Want a worse example ? Medical doctors (I'm one). Some of the fellow doctors I've seen still do all their document formatting using space bar. There are highly considered specialists with a long list of publication that smash repeatedly on the space bar until things seem grossly aligned on screen. And then don't understand while the document doesn't come the same when they print it. Or open it in another version of Word.
Those are the mythical "80%" people that only use "20%" of the feature of an office suite. Not a different set of "20%" than anyone else. The basic "20%" that form the common ground of any office suite. The "20%" of features that Word shares with Notepad.
They have no concept of "styles" or flagging "titles" (they probably imagine an "index" is something you write tediously by hand. Usually they transmit that job to interns. Who go though the document painfully fixing the format so the "index" function works as intended).
And you want them to switch to TeX when submitting papers to Life-Science journal ? They will just faint at the idea of launching something that doesn't look exactly like what they are used to on screen, and will have a hard time to find out which is the new icon to click to save.

And don't let me start about the level of maths and statistics we learn in medical school (near to absolute zero). Most of us hire a statistician whenever some button on a calculator need to be pressed. There's no such thing as a need for a better formula-writing environment.

Thankfully the arrival of bioinformatics, medical informatics, medical imaging and such computer intensive speciality in the field of life science will bring a little bit more computer litteracy. (Thankfully for me that are fields that I'm studying too, so there's plenty of job opportuni

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[dltaylor]

The legal profession used to one of the last holdouts for WordPerfect, because it allowed the decade-old files to be read in the latest version. How are you going to handle a 8- or 9-year-old deposition saved in Word 2005 format in 2013? Are you at least converting them to PDF?

Everyone who says that Word is an acceptable archive format for documents is a complete (fully trained) idiot.

I picked up a resume written in WP 4, on an Amiga, and imported it trivially (it did ask if I knew the format was WP 4) into WP 8 on X86 Linux.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[m4cph1sto]

My experience is that most journals accept TeX submissions, but they strongly recommend submissions using a Word (2003 or earlier) template. Personally, I write all my papers using LaTeX, and submit the TeX-generated PDFs to the journals. Then I generate a Word document using a program like Tex2Word (or whatever) and submit that as well. The journal emails only the PDF (which, thanks to TeX, looks nice and professional) to the reviewers. The reason journals require a Word document is because it is simple for them to copy the text from the Word document into their commercial typesetting system to produce the print versions of the article. Since most journals don't use TeX as their internal typesetting system, conversion of TeX submissions to their proprietary format takes extra effort on their part, and they discourage it. However, many journals (ACS journals in particular) will still accept TeX submissions, simply because so many academics use it.

Journals

[looneyboy784]

Has anybody at Slashdot ever actually submitted anything to a journal? You are all advocating LaTeX but the truth is many journals will not accept anything other than a single column .doc file that they can copy and paste into their fancy typesetting software. A LaTeX file is useless to them as they use none of its typesetting features. I tried it once and got turned down because they wanted the .doc version pain in the ass but I learned my lesson.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell yes they do.

No they do not.

My husband is a mathematician, and he uses the whole alphabet, the whole greek alphabet, and then has to improvise in some of his papers, and it's full of actual equations with all kinds of superscripts and subscripts and various integration symbols and whatnot.

You can do all that in MS Word too. So why does your husband use LaTeX?

I'm in grad school in a social science field, and I rarely to never would even put an equation of any sort in a paper. I'd run all my ANOVAs and regressions and whatever other stats on SPSS and then put in some graphs and tables that show numbers, not variables. I might use N or F or p.

LaTeX won't stop you from writing papers that way. If you don't need things like \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-\frac{a}{b}}}, then don't use those macros.

I could use LaTeX like he does, but I don't really have a need for it.

Neither does he. You don't need LaTeX to write mathematics. The field got along quite well for a rather long time before LaTeX came to be.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Anthony]

They are quite cognisant of TeX. There is extensive submission guidlines [sciencemag.org].

"Please do not send TeX or LaTeX files for your initial submission. Convert the files to PostScript or PDF instead. [Important: Screen legibility of the PostScript or PDF file is essential for rapid and thorough evaluation of your manuscript; please ensure that the .ps or .pdf file you generate from your TeX/LaTeX source does not include Type 3 bitmapped fonts.]

Although we do not accept TeX and LaTeX source for initial manuscript submission, these formats are acceptable for manuscripts that have been revised after peer review. To save time at this later stage, authors using these packages for their initial submission are encouraged to review our instructions for preparing text and tables using LaTeX."

Equation editor

[Z34107]

What makes you think that will fix the equation editor problem with M$'s new formats?

They did "fix" the equation editor. The result is the new one that Office 2007 uses by default.

The original one was a third-party package Microsoft bought and put into Word, and could be somewhat daunting. The new one is simpler and built into the ribbon, but really only useful for one-line formulas.

Something everyone's missing, though: THE ORIGINAL EQUATION EDITOR IS STILL IN OFFICE 2007!. Put in your "Microsoft Equation" object the same way you always have - insert->object.

Re:Journals

[lahvak]

Pretty much every math journal out there accepts LaTeX. Some of them actually require LaTeX. Lats year I had to help a colleague of mine from our computer science department convert a paper drom word to LaTeX, because he was submitting it into a math journal, and LaTeX was the only format they would accept.

Re:Journals

[Trelane]

and physics In fact, they have their own document classes....

Re:It's always a surprise

[belmolis]

Every serious TeX user that I have known keeps a personal copy of any non-standard packages, as I do. I have often printed out documents that I wrote 20 years ago with no more difficulty than changing /usr2/poser/bin/tex to /home/poser/bin/tex in the include statements. People who use Latex rather than raw Tex generally have an even easier time of it as they are less likely to be using unusual macro packages.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[ljw1004]

It's worth checking out the new Office2007 equation editor (which is also built into Wordpad in Vista). It typesets maths more elegantly than TeX thanks to kerning that's aware of the whitespace in each corner of a glyph or compound glyph. Also it's unicode through and through which allows for more uniformity between body text and equations. Apart from those things, it uses the standard tex-style algorithms for equations. The new equation editor itself is rock solid.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Man Eating Duck]

You'd thing something TeX-based would be more suited for this purpose

Maybe for writing it, but not for submissions. You tend to run into all sorts of conversion problems, font incompatibility among other things. Most printing houses only accept PDF from professional clients.

Word is a surprisingly common format in the publishing business. I work at an academic publishing house, handling the preparation of documents for printing. We publish most of the theses for a large university, as well as ~70 books and other publications a year.

Regarding books and similar projects, we try to accept any format we can convert to something you can import into a typesetting application. The thing is that among academics, more than the most basic knowledge of computers is uncommon. They use whichever program is available, most commonly Word. Formulae, graphs, even tables, are ofthen created in a suitable program, and inserted into the document as an image. We have the technical expertise to convert whatever they submit into something printable. It is not their concern, neither should it be.

I don't get why the journals would balk at any specific format, they should have the means to convert it anyway. Let the scientists worry about the science, and the publisher handle the preparation of the manuscript. In the worst case you request better source material, but that should be quite rare.

Still, I would love for all our authors to use something better than Word :)

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Sparr0]

Is this supposed to be funny? TFA explicitly states that anything produced by the new equation editor, which can't output to MathML, is unusable for multiple reasons including DRM.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Sapphon]

Hello - have you used Office 2007?

1. PDF publishing is supported (free) with a download from the Microsoft website (the only reason it wasn't bundled is because Adobe didn't want it to be).

2. Citations and Bibliographies are both supported under Word: there's that whole "Reference" tab. Not having used BibTeX I can't compare - but then, neither can you, apparently.

3. Office 2007 documents can be saved to document managment servers for sharing. I don't know what that entails, but it's there, and easy to find.

4. LaTeX has style files; Word has templates. What's the difference? Templates seem rather fragile to you, and some journals don't offer them. I'm not sure this even needs rebutting -- failure to offer templates isn't Word's fault, and, well they seem solid to me, so we're at 1:1

I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively, but I do know it's not as bad as you make it out to be. That 80/20 rule is precisely what Microsoft tried to address with their new layout, since -- probably due to their ubiquity -- the Office products are routinely underrated as far as their functionality goes (probably less so by the /. crowd); Excel, for instance, has some powerful statistical tool. Sure, it's no STATA, but before I shell out $900 on STATA I'd rather install some modules and read some documentation.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Sangui5]

Well, a few (honest) questions, & some comments...

Hello - have you used Office 2007?

Well, it's only been out 4 months. I based everything I said off of previous incarnations of Office, from 2003 (the second latest-n-greatest) to 95 (when WordPerfect started sucking). Given I don't want to replace my shiny & new copy of Office 2003 so soon after I got it, I won't be purchasing 2007 for some time. And nor will I be using to submit to Nature or Science, apparently, even if it were free.

1. PDF publishing is supported (free)

That's good to hear, and long long missing. Questions: is the output of "Print to PDF, then print the PDF" the same as just printing? I've had issues with such software producing different output that way (even sometimes products made by Adobe!). Also, how "good" is the PDF output. That is, are the files sizes quite small, is it embedding proper scaleable fonts, and does it print fast? A big problem with the old "print to .PRN, change extension to .PS, then ps2pdf" way of going from Word to PDF was getting bloated, poor quality, and complex PDF files; even Acrobat sometimes will non-sensibly make a crappy PDF.

2. Citations and Bibliographies are both supported under Word

Having used BibTeX, I will never go back. There are huge [citeulike.org] databases [psu.edu] of freely available BibTeX format citations. The second runner up, EndNote, hasn't nearly the amount of citations available (although importing BibTeX into EndNote isn't hard). I have used EndNote, and it is not nearly as good as BibTeX. Other people [msdn.com] (read the comments) seem to feel that EndNote works better than Word 2007's support; I simply don't believe that a mouse-driven interface for adding citations can ever beat a text-based one.

Office 2007 documents can be saved to document managment servers for sharing

I think you're missing the point. LaTeX easily allows you (and encourages you) to split your documents up into multiple files. So, regardless of what collaboration service you use, anything from emailing files back and forth to something overly complicated like SourceVault, you can have multiple people editing the same document simultaneously. They just work on different sub-files. I've done it with email, but usually do use RCS to automate the locking support. Unless Office 2007 vastly changes things, Word documents are still monolithic files. That makes it quite difficult to support simultaneous editing; you *need* a concurrent versioning system. And, forgoing large changes in Office 2007, .doc files are still stored as BLOBS, which makes automated commit/merging difficult to impossible.

4. LaTeX has style files; Word has templates. What's the difference?

As best I can tell (I've never found it, and I've tried...) you can't apply a template to a document after the fact (and get the expected results). If my paper is rejected from one place, I can reformat the entire document by changing which style file I include. Style files pretty much guarantee that all of the final product will have a consistent look, and that said look is easy to change across the board. Journals that are either done all in LaTeX or those that hire separate typesetters (for mucho $$$) have the most consistent appearance. Others look a bit like just a bunch of papers glued together.

I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively,

Except for those on the Office 2007 team, *nobody* has used Office 2007 extensively :)

From talking with people who have used 2007, there is quite a learning jump to go from 2003 to 2007. Especially since 2007 breaks math support for journals, it makes sense to consider moving to LaTeX just a

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Sapphon]

Given I don't want to replace my shiny & new copy of Office 2003 so soon after I got it, I won't be purchasing 2007 for some time.

Fair enough. I use OneNote on a Tablet PC on a daily basis, and the improvement in OneNote 2007 over 2003 was easily worth the AUD$75 I got it for (hooray for Australia [itsnotcheating.com.au])

Questions: is the output of "Print to PDF, then print the PDF" the same as just printing?

As long as you choose the correct page size (the PDF plugin defaults to "Letter", whereas I print to A4), yes.

Also, how "good" is the PDF output. That is, are the files sizes quite small, is it embedding proper scaleable fonts, and does it print fast?

Excellent. I've tried various free PDF Printers (for non-office applications), and this wipes the floor with them. The files sizes are small (unless I've got a whole lot of handwritten stuff, but that's only in OneNote), the fonts are properly embedded, and it's quick: no opening up a second or third dialog box to confirm again -- 'Save as PDF', choose filename, done. A 12 page assignment with charts, graphs, diagrams was converted in under a second, with 118 KB (76 KB as a .doc). The converter is, after all, from Adobe.

I have used EndNote, and it is not nearly as good as BibTeX. Other people (read the comments) seem to feel that EndNote works better than Word 2007's support; I simply don't believe that a mouse-driven interface for adding citations can ever beat a text-based one.

I'll take your word for it, since I haven't used BibTeX. So far I've been happy with the Office offering, but then, I don't write that many articles.

I think you're missing the point. LaTeX easily allows you (and encourages you) to split your documents up into multiple files.

You're right, I missed that. However, while I can see where splitting large files up might be of use during simultaneous editing, how often is this an issue? Not simply the simultaneous editing, but having files so large they cause problems? I can't believe this would be much a of deal-breaker in an Office/LaTeX comparison.

As best I can tell (I've never found it, and I've tried...) you can't apply a template to a document after the fact (and get the expected results). If my paper is rejected from one place, I can reformat the entire document by changing which style file I include.

I haven't (yet) changed templates mid-stream -- or post-stream, even -- so I can't counter that argument. Ah, the joys of arguing about a new product.. /sardonic

I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively,

Except for those on the Office 2007 team, *nobody* has used Office 2007 extensively :)

The latter = LaTeX

From talking with people who have used 2007, there is quite a learning jump to go from 2003 to 2007

Rubbish. I don't want to insult any friends of yours, but those people are either power-users whose favourite routines have just been broken, or nitwits. If you know of a feature, it's not hard to find -- and what's more, stuff you didn't know about is there right next to it. Like the Bibliography thing: 1 click on the "Reference" tab gives me options for citations, bibliographies, table of contents, indexes, footnotes, endnotes, cross-referencing, blah blah blah... as soon as Joe Schmoe wants to put in a Footnote, he suddenly learns he can do an Endnote instead. Or a Crossreference. Or a Citation. Etc.
I do a lot of different things with my Office Suite, and needed no more than a day or two to be just as comfortable with it as 2003. After a week, I couldn't imagine going back.

Especially since 2007 breaks math support for journals, it makes sense to consider moving to LaTeX just as much as an alternative to moving to Office 2007.

If you