Reactivate Microsoft Office Equation Editor 3.0
Amabella Tevebaugh
[German]On January 9, 2018, Microsoft released security updates for Microsoft Office. Subsequently, users discovered that the formula editor was missing in Word or other Office modules. Here is some information and a solution how to get the Equation editor back.
Equation Edition s a sad chapter in Microsoft Office. In the summer of 2017, researchers from the cyber security company Embedi discovered a CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability in the Office formula editor. An article about the bugs can also be found here. i. It turned out that this vulnerability was present in all Microsoft Office and Windows versions for the last 17 years.
The equation editor EQNEDT32.EXE, which was included in Microsoft Office until 2007 but was still shipped with Office, received an update to close the gap on November 2017 patchday (I mentioned it in the blog post Microsoft Office security updates (November 14, 2017)).
While Microsoft replaced the old EQNEDT32.EXE component with a new component in 2007, the older file is still included in all Office installations so that users can load and edit equations that were created with the old component. Microsoft had to take action because hackers already exploited this vulnerability (see Hacker are misusing CVE-2017-11882 in Office EQNEDT32.EXE).
In my German blog post Hat Microsoft Zugriff auf Teile des Office-Quellcodes verloren? I had also pointed out that Microsoft has patched the formula editor binary, which is a bit obscure. The speculation was that Microsoft no longer has access to the source code.
We read your article on our analysis of the Equation Editor patch and would like to clarify that Office 2003 is, peculiarly, not vulnerable because for some reason, its Equation Editor executable is different and seems to have been built (or manually patched) 5 years later than the same executable in Office 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016/365.
In January 2018, Microsoft rolled out numerous security updates for Microsoft Office. I had described these in the blog post Microsoft Patchday: Office, Flash, Windows (January 9, 2018). In this German comment blog reader Joschi points out that the updates will remove the equation editor.
Also within this German Microsoft-Answers forum post someone noticed. There are other places to find it. On the PC, when clicking on a formula from Formula Editor 3.0, the error message: "Microsoft Equation Editor not available" appears.
However, in Office 2016, several files remain in the EQUATION folder after the update, and in some cases a 0-byte file EQNEDT32.EXE remains on the system.
The location of the EQUATION folder depends on both the Office version and whether the Office version is 32-bit or 64-bit. These are the default directories:
You can copy the missing files from the Office installation media or another computer back to the appropriate folders. Afterwards, register the equation editor as a COM server again. And then you should install the 0patch fixes to close the vulnerarbility. opatch has published the exact description in this blog post. Maybe it will help the one or other user who depends on the formula editor 3.0.
I have 20 years of work invested in this equation editor 3.0 for microsoft office 2007
I think. It stopped working this week of May 11-15, I need this to work on my files, I have tried my different things . Herb Pynn
My Word (on Microsoft 365) has updated to Modern Comments. I have a number of problems with the useability of these comments, based on the way I have used them in the past (for context, I am an educator and primarily use them when marking student assignments).
The main issue is that autotext is no longer supported in a comment. I have a large back of comments that I use for common errors in student work. Some of these comments are up to a paragraph, or contain URLs to instructions for certain things. It's incredibly helpful to be able to insert these quickly and will increase my marking time substantially if I can't use them.
They don't use the same autocorrect tools as the main text. My typing has evolved to use those features. Two capital letters at the start of a comment don't get corrected, and simple typos don't get corrected
There are more steps to use them than before. I don't share my documents, so being able to edit comments and post when they're finalised is not particularly useful for me, as no one else is looking at them until I send the document. However, I can't click out of it to finish, I have to click or ctrl+Enter to post. I also can't just click INTO it to edit, I have to click on more buttons.
It doesn't make sense to only be allowed to edit one comment at a time, particularly if the idea is to not post them until you're ready to share with others. Sometimes in the course of writing one comment, I want to comment on something else first and then come back to the previous comment. You're forced to finish one first, to the standard you're happy for others to see, defeating the purpose of not having to post until it's finished. Why not allow multiple to be in draft?
It has added an extra space to the side of the document, which wouldn't be an issue except that making any formatting changes under tracked change, which I often also do when marking assignments, goes into the ORIGINAL pane where comments use to be, widening the document even further (extra space for formatting, then another extra space for comments). My computer screen isn't large enough to cope with the extra width.
Once I post a comment, it's still selected. There have been a number of times I've posted a comment then tried to ctrl+F something in the document, but it won't respond to my ctrl+F. Not something that is necessarily a huge issue but it is annoying and I can't see the purpose for keeping a comment selected when it's posted and non-responsive.
Yes, please allow us to revert this awful and regressive "update". Everything said above is true and in addition, equations don't render properly in the new comments, it is no longer obvious what text is being referenced by a comment when it used to be easy to highlight a section of text and comment on that section specifically, and the inability to just click into and edit comments is unbelievably frustrating. What is the purpose of this ridiculous extra annoyance of having to "post comments".... Help!
I agree with all of this 100%. I am having the same issues. Another issue is that the modern comments is not allowing formatting like superscript and subscript which is making it much harder, well impossible, to instruct typesetters on changes that require such formatting
I totally agree!!!! I have been complaining about this so-called upgrade since the day it was foisted on us. As an academic, it has made my job of marking papers much harder. The least Microsoft could do is allow us to go back to the "old" commenting without having to mess with the Registry. I have complained to them directly with of course not even a response. How many of us have to be angry before they hear us? I need to put symbols in the comments. I need to change the color of the text in the comments. I want to jump from one comment to another without MS getting in the way. I have many phrase shortcuts that all are now useless. Come on, Microsoft, do the right thing!
I have paid to use Office 365 which includes Word 2016. At this point, I believe I'm due a refund. The product I've been paying for no longer exists. The ease of working that comments provided (I am an editor and teacher) no longer exists. I have now finished fifteen pages in the time I would once have finished thirty.
You know all of the problems with Modern Comments (should you need clarification please read the many posts here. Check other social media, too.) so I won't elaborate further. I write to ask for a refund. The product I'm paying for is gone.
You have perverted a once useful office tool into another social media platform. I'm sure that most editors and teachers have no desire to 'start a conversation' because we work alone. Also, we look dopey when our comments contain spelling, capitalization, and other errors that were once auto-corrected based on self-created defaults. Modern comments is utterly disconnected from Word and therefore useless in many work environments.
In my opinion, criteria 1 of INDISCRIMINATE, sometimes called NOTPLOT or PLOT, is wholly redundant to the notability guidelines, serves no useful purpose, is liable to produce clearly absurd results, and should be deleted. If the plot of a book is summarised in reasonable detail by a dedicated article in the NYT and a dedicated article in Britannica we should certainly have a Wikipedia article on that book. A summary of the plot of a notable book is a reasonable thing to include. I can see no reason whatsoever not to include it. I can only infer from its complete redundancy that NOTPLOT must pre-date the notability guidelines and is now simply obsolete and has been retained through inertia alone. Criteria 4 of "Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal" ("Internet guides") has the same problems and should also be deleted for the same reasons. And we could get rid NOTMEMORIAL as well, because that adds nothing to GNG or BIO. So, in summary, NOTPLOT and what might be called "NOTINTERNETGUIDE" are positively harmful and NOTMEMORIAL is useless. James500 (talk) 16:50, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
James: if you think this policy doesn't reflect consensus, you are welcome to start an RFC on the topic. That would perhaps be more productive as it would settle this one way or the other - though it may not have the result you would like, the above isn't accomplishing much and is getting off the immediate topic at hand. Nikkimaria (talk) 15:55, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
A further problem to keep in mind regarding plot summaries - detailed summaries even with commentary can be considered copyright violations; there is case law for this. More reason why we want articles on fiction to avoid weighing too much on the plot and edging for conciseness. --MASEM (t) 06:03, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
7fc3f7cf58