Collaborating with Microsoft Word Users

Many of us have colleagues who expect to recieve and be welcomed to edit Microsoft Word documents. Fortunately, reproducability can be maintained. With the manuscript-example.Rmd file open, notice that the knit PDF button is actually a drop down menu and knit Word is an option. If you click it, it will return to you a Microsoft Word document that you can deliver to your colleague or professor.

They can be formatted with a .docx template. See the ‘Style Reference` description on this page. Using the template will keep you having to format the whole thing every time you update your colleagues and professors.

You might have noticed that there is also a tablesandfigures.Rmd file in the root directory. This is for users who will need to produce Word documents. I have found no clean way to produce decently formatted tables and figures in Word using this method. I recommend keeping tables and figures in a separate docuemnt that you always render as a PDF, and a separate file for the manuscript text.

Equations are still a problem. Pandoc can interpret math symbols surrounded by $, as $\exp^{i \pi} = -1$ will be rendered as exp^i**π =  − 1. However, these equations are not automatically numbered. To get automatically numbered equations that can be cross-referenced, they must be produced with pure Latex code. As in,

\begin{equation} \Delta y_t = \alpha + \gamma y_{t-1} + \delta_1 \Delta y_{t-1} + \dots + \delta_{p-1} \Delta y_{t-p-1} + \epsilon_t \end{equation}

being rendered as,

Δy_t = α + γ**y_t − 1 + δ₁Δy_t − 1 + … + δ_p − 1Δy_{t − p − 1} + ϵ_t

The trouble is that Latex is ignored by pandoc when producing Word documents so when you knit the Word document after writing your equations in pure Latex, they will be missing from the Word docuemnt. This means you will have to replace them in the Word document one way or another. There is a reasonable workaround. Iguana Tex is a Microsoft Powerpoint add-in that takes Latex equations and returns copy-and-pasteable figures of typeset equations. I recommend creating one new slide for each equation in your document, then use Iguana Tex to obtain figures of your equations that can be pasted into the Word document.