MathType Tips: How to Remove Italics

Just a quick Thursday tip for all of your writers who use MathType, which I happen to know is most of you...

You may have noticed that we often tell you not to italicize units in MathType or we ask you kindly to add a space between the unit and the value, but maybe you're not sure how to un-italicize them because you're stuck in "Math" mode. Well, here's how to easily fix that issue. No more italicized units or weird formatting problems.

Italicized units look like this screenshot, and you'll confuse students if you randomly italicize something like "feet", "meters", or "inches" for no good reason.

 To fix this, just double-click on the Mathtype and the editing box will open. Then highlight the right side of the equation (you want that L' variable to remain italicized, so leave that little guy alone). From there, go to "Style". You'll see that "Math" is selected by default. This automatically assumes you're typing equations so it will italicize everything and will not allow you to input spaces at all. Instead, click "Text" style.

Voila! This screenshot below is exactly what you want to see:

Then when you exit out of the box, make sure to hit "Save". Your answer will now look proper and lovely and have the correct italics or non-italics. 

Now, on to the next solution... 

How To Create a Template in Word (.dot)

Happy Friday! We're bringing you another helpful tip on authoring today to close out the week.

This week's tip is a HUGE time-saver. We're teaching you how to create templates in Word. Do this now and save yourself hours and hours of boring formatting work over the long run! That means more solutions written, more productivity, and more money for you. That's good all around.

Now, let's get started. We'll go over what a template is, how to create one, and how to save it. If you have further questions, ask them here on the blog or on the LinkedIn group.

What is a template?
A template is a document that saves all of its formatting (fonts, delimiters, margins, page size, headers) so you can easily duplicate your solution format again and again. Imagine all the tedious time saved! A template saves in a .dot format, so make sure that when you finish each solution and save it, you change the name and convert this to .docx. More on that in the final part of this tutorial.

How do I create a template?
It's super easy. For our purposes, you can actually use our template document that we send you when you start a project, and then just go to File>Save As>Word Template. Alternatively, create your own template for certain types of solutions (i.e. maybe you have a lot of similar discussion questions or accounting questions with similar tables). Now, each time you open that file, it will preserve all formatting so you can start fresh with each new solution. Voila!

How do I save each solution?
Now, you know you'll need to change certain things in each file, like the chapter ID and problem ID, possibly the date (unless you also make that update automatically too, smart idea.). Then you're all done writing the solution. You can't simply hit Ctrl+S. You'll need to go to the file menu and Save As. Just hit .docx, update the file name to reflect your BookID-ChapID-ProbID, and then you're all set.

It's as easy as that. Imagine how much time that will save you in the long run if you set that up now. In solutions authoring, time really is the same thing as money, so we recommend you do this today!

For more information on this, check out Microsoft's tutorial on their website. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!

A Note on Payments...

I know you make this face when your check arrives...

Many of you have brought up suggestions for our payment process. These ideas have included payment tracking, direct deposits, more lenient cut-off dates, weekly payments, and so on. While we love to hear your ideas and suggestions (and we do read every one), these decisions are ultimately made by our finance team.

We unfortunately have very little control over the process, but we do have a great in-house finance team, and they make sure that we're doing everything by the book and not breaking any laws or making anyone angry. One of the main laws that dictate how we process payments is that there must be a temporary hold placed on your payments. For contractors, this hold is "net 15", which means we can't send out the checks until 15 days after a check request is sent (that's what we do on the last Friday of the month). We're lucky that we were able to get this down from the typical "net 30" hold.

We wish it was as simple as pressing a button on PayPal or Venmo and depositing money into your checking account immediately, but there are many regulations in place that we must adhere to. We're doing our best because we know you're giving us your all!

With that said, I will be creating a quick calendar of payment dates to remember for 2013.

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and a very happy new year!