Writing special characters can be quite tough while writing in Microsoft word. Can anyone suggest me what is the most user friendly software for writing equations in research papers?
for example, when you installed Ms word 2007 I think version 1.0 is integrated automatically. You can find the new versions of MathType on the website.
The bug - of course - is that the more elegant you would like it to be, the more work it entails.
The Word system is fine when simply writing text, but once you need to write a whole manuscript with some math in it, it gets tedious, and most often it will not look ideal. That's where LaTeX comes in - it is more complicated, yes, yes, but you are now the boss, as with LaTeX you do can create whatever you like. And the good bit is that you can copy/paste from previous papers you have written, so that you don't need to start anew every time when you - for example - you need to create a table - just copy an older one and add lines or whatever. That it is easy to re-use is quite handy. I will definitely not use Word ever again when writing anything with math symbols - LaTeX is both king and queen of type-setting.