Page 111 - A Guide to MATLAB for Beginners and Experienced Users

92 Chapter 6: M-Books

The M-book interface allows the user to operate MATLAB from a special
Microsoft Word document instead of from a MATLAB Command Window. In
this mode, the user should think of Word as running in the foreground and
MATLAB as running in the background. Lines that you enter into your Word
document are passed to the MATLAB engine in the background and executed
there, whereupon the output is returned to Word (through the intermediary of

Visual Basic ), and then both input and output are automatically formatted.
One obtains a living document in the sense that one can edit the document as
one normally edits a word processing document. So one can revisit input lines
that need adjustment, change them, and reexecute on the spot — after which
the old outdated output is automatically overwritten with new output. The
graphical output that results from MATLAB graphics commands appear in
the Word document, immediately after the commands that generated them.
Erroneous input and output are easily expunged, enhanced formatting can
be done in a way that is no more complicated than what one does in a word
processor, and in the end the result of your MATLAB session can be an at-
tractive, easily readable, and highly informative document. Of course, one can
“cheat” by editing one’s output — we shall discuss that and other pitfalls and
strengths in what follows.

Enabling M-Books

To run the M-book interface you must have Microsoft Word on your com-
puter. It is possible to run the interface with earlier versions of Word, but
we find that it works best if you have Word 97. (In fact, we find that it
runs better in Word 97 than it does in Word 2000, though the difference is
not usually significant.) The interface is enabled when you install MATLAB.
This is done in one of three ways depending on which version of MATLAB
you have. In some instances, during installation, you will be prompted to
enter the location of the Word executable file and the Word template direc-
tory. These are usually easily located; for example, on many PCs the former
is in MSOffice\Office\Winword.exe, and the latter is in MSOffice\
Templates. You may also be asked to specify a template file — in that case,
select normal.dot in the Templates directory. The installation program will
create a new template called m-book.dot, which is the Word template file as-
sociated withM-book documents.

If you don’t know where the Word files are located on your PC, go to Find
from the Start menu on the Task Bar, and search your hard drive for the
files Winword.exe and normal.dot.