Yesterday I met with a collaborator, a president of a start-up company that received quite a few SBIR awards. The STREAM Tools Handbook came up in conversation, he took great interest in the subject and we discussed a number of formatting issues. The numbering of figures in Microsoft Word came up. He also had the experience that autonumbering does not work on textboxes, and there is no other elegant way to implement text flow around the figure. Their company event contacted Microsoft asking for solutions, but the suggested solutions did not work.
Our recommended workarounds remain:
1) Put two half-width figures inside a table, one row, two columns, make table borders invisible, and use autoformatted captions as usually suggested in STREAM Tools templates. This is not an ideal solution, just one of the better ones. It is not ideal for two reasons: one, you have to manage the white text as figures move around the page during edition, and two, it is hard to place the figures at the top or at the bottom of the page.
2) Switch to a double-column text, so that the text flows next to the figure. This solution allows you to manipulate with one figure only. The disadvantages are the same as in the previous solution, plus, your pagination may be messed up and will require more attention in the future - this is because the switch to double-column requires a section break, and the section break affects pagination.
Alas, this is the best we can do, and we do not know anyone in the world who has an ideal solution in Microsoft Word. Let us know if you do.
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