Is there any free Equation Editor Control?

Converting Equation Editor 3.1 objects to Office 2010 Equation Text

• Is there any way to convert equation objects made in Equation Editor 3/3.1 into the updated, direct in-line text in the new Equation Tool for Office 2007/2010? The large project I'm working on has dozens of PowerPoint files, with slides containing numerous equations that I have to update. Most of the equations are in the 3.1 format- clicking on them shows the large white border around them, they are treated like a Drawing object, and clicking in that opens up the old 3.1 editor. What I need to do is replace this with a simple text line of the equation using the updated equation editor in Word 2007/2010. I know that if you had an equation just written as text, you can highlight it with alt-= and convert it to the new Equation Editor. Is there ANY way to do this with the text inside older Equation Editor 3 objects? I would LOVE to not have to retype all of these.

• Answer:

  I know VBA fairly well, so I had a look around the Office documentation, and it's clear that the while the Office 2007+ equations are first class citizens of the Office document world, the 2003 ones are just plain old embedded objects. So there's no way to do it in Office. It looks as if http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/ is what you want for exporting the Equation Editor equations to a more civilised format (LATEX or MathML), and I hope someone a little more familiar can say how to get MathML into Office 2007+ if you don't already know. All I know is that it's possible.