Efofex News

You have always been able to change the colors of functions and statistics graphs – but it has always been a bit slow and fiddly. Each function or data set needed to be changed individually which was slow and error prone.

In the latest versions (19.05.27), we have added the ability to quickly change ALL of the functions or data sets.

Function Graphs

The quick entry screen for functions has seen two changes. Firstly, any changes made to line widths or point sizes now affect ALL functions. You can, for example, set all function lines to 2pt with one change.

The second change is the addition of a palette button. Pressing this allows you to change the color settings of all function lines. You have the choice of setting all functions to one color (normally black) or to choose one of twelve different color schemes, including the “classic” color palettes. Once you have chosen a color palette, pressing Set As Default will keep your current settings for all future graphs.

If you wish to change the color or line width of an individual line, you now need to change to the Function Properties tab.

Statistics Graphs

We have also added color schemes to statistics graphs.

The colors of individual data sets can be changed by pressing the data set buttons.

You can find a short video of the new feature at https://youtu.be/eyOVZiF7TXg

Microsoft has been promoting its OneNote (Microsoft store) app to users and preferentially installs it for Office 365 users on Windows machines. Unfortunately it has quite a few issues, and not just for Efofex Software. The main impact it is having on our users is that you cannot directly paste Efofex graphics into the OneNote app. We are aware of the problem and have approached Microsoft to help resolve it. Please note that we believe that the root-cause of the issue is the OneNote App as the graphics can be pasted into OneNote 2016, OneNote Online, Word – in fact everywhere apart from the OneNote App.

The new App version of OneNote is not very popular. If you go to the answers.microsoft.com website and search for “Hate OneNote” you will find hundreds of people bemoaning the cessation of development of the desktop version (OneNote 2016). We believe that Microsoft has made a strategic error with the new version and is quite likely to make a change in the future. Either way we will be working to try to mitigate the effects of this version.

Many schools do not permit teachers to use the new app as all notebooks MUST be stored in the cloud. OneNote 2016 allows local notebooks which are mandated by many schools. If you are one of these lucky teachers, well done!

If You Are Being Affected

The best solution is to download and install OneNote 2016. This is free and is
(arguably) a better version. You can find it on this Microsoft page. Most teachers should use the 32 bit version of OneNote 2016.

If the OneNote app is mandated in your school there are two options:

1. Use OneNote Online when inserting graphics into a notebook.
2. Paste the graphics into Word FIRST and then copy them (from Word) to the clipboard to be pasted into the OneNote app.

Rest assured that we will continue to work on the issue.

All of our products have now been updated to a new lightweight look and we have added a new Help & Account Management Centre. You can access the centre through the Help menu (1) or by pushing the blue ? Help button on the toolbar (2).

Why? So we can customise the information we provide depending on the sort of user you are.

Efofex products have now existed for thirty years. This means that we have an enormous group of LONG-term users but we also have to provide assistance for new people who have never seen our products.

When you first visit the centre, we will ask you one or two questions so we can provide the information YOU need.

Once you have answered the questions, you can use the tabs to access important information on how to use our products as well as the latest news from Efofex. The Deploy tab provides information for network administrators that can make deploying our products much easier. The Account tab gives you information about the current status of your account.

The new Help & Account Management centre is a dynamic source of focused information. Download the latest versions and take a look today!

The current releases of Efofex products now give you greater control over integration with Word (only applicable for users on Windows machines using our “Classic” inserted object mode.)

On the Help menu, you can now choose to Manage the Word Integration.

Choose which products you wish to have integrated and press OK.

This new feature allows users to manage Word Integration themselves.

Please note that we only recommend that you only use Classic Mode when inserting equations into Word documents on Windows machines but long-term users of our products do like to use Classic Mode for all products.

FX Draw has always provided a rich set of tools designed specifically for mathematics teachers. Now we are giving you the world!

The February 1 release of FX Draw includes a new Earth geometry tool that allows you to quickly create diagrams showing distances between locations using either great-circles or travel on lines of longitude and latitude. You can even animate your diagram in real time to demonstrate the mathematics involved.

A database of over 13000 locations is provided which you can search by name, latitude or longitude. This allows you to quickly create questions to suit the needs of your students.

We have created a short video to show the tool in action. You can view the video here.

We have released a new version of FX Equation that greatly improves its usability.

The new vertical mode splits your screen vertically instead of the traditional horizontal split. This makes it much easier to manage long solutions.

If you don’t like the new view, you can always switch back to the old style by pushing the horizontal style button (see above).

We have also added line highlighting which shows you the line currently being edited. Combined with greatly improved side-by-side scrolling, it is now much easier to create long equations without getting “lost”.

You may have noticed that we recently changed the way we allocate version numbers to our products. For example, the latest version of FX Draw is V19.02.01 and was released on February 1, 2019.

The new version numbers allow (and us) to always know exactly when your version was released. The new versions numbers should help everyone keep up-to-date.

We have added Pareto graphs to both FX Stat and FX Draw to support the NSW (Australian) curriculum. If you use Pareto graphs in your teaching, make sure that you download the latest release of FX Draw Tools.

Recently we began receiving reports that Word files using graphics from our products, being created on Mac computers, were becoming outrageously large. For example, a file which would be about 300kB when created on a Windows version of Word was about 40MB on a Mac.

Our investigations indicate that Microsoft has made a change to the Mac version of Word which causes it to internally save graphics in the extremely inefficient TIFF format. On a Windows machine, Word saves the exact same image in the highly efficient PNG format. This difference accounts for the huge file size discrepancy. This problem is nothing to do with Efofex products, any image placed on the clipboard will be treated in the same way. Our products just tend to highlight the problem (so we get the blame). We have NO idea why Microsoft has made this change.

While we have reported this strange behaviour to Microsoft, we are not expecting any action soon – Microsoft simply does not work that way. We anticipate that, at some stage in the future, Microsoft will reverse this change and file sizes will revert back to what they should be.

While we have no way of changing Microsoft’s software, we can help mitigate the problem. In the latest versions we have included a new beta feature which compresses docx Word files. We do this by opening up the file, finding all of the graphics stored as TIFF files and converting them to PNG files. This can often lead to file size reductions of up to 99% with no loss in image quality.

As this is a beta feature, we have made it non-destructive. If you use the compressor, you will see a new version of the file created in the same directory (Geometry Test.docx would become Geometry Test (compressed).docx.) Your original file is untouched and we implore you to check that the new file opens BEFORE deleting the original file.

The new feature is available on both the Mac and Windows versions of our products.

If you use the Efofex Word toolbars on Windows, we have made a change to the support we offer.

Up until the October 29 release, we have included support for using OLE on PowerPoint. This support added a layer of complexity to the OLE service and we have determined that providing this support was a large part of the issues that some users were experiencing with OLE. As very few people use OLE with PowerPoint (it is now a much better idea to use the new, Graphics ID system with PowerPoint) we have decided to remove the PowerPoint support for future releases.

If you use our toolbars in Word on your Windows machine, we recommend that you download the latest release. It is likely that your experience of OLE will be improved.