Adding “Evaluate Notebook” to the menu of Mathematica 6

May 23rd, 2008 | Categories: applications, math software, mathematica | Tags:

Although Mathematica 6 has been out for quite a while now there are still some people at my university who refuse to upgrade from Mathematica 5.2 for one reason or another. Some don’t like the new help system, others don’t have the time to rewrite teaching notes and some find that their old Mathematica scripts simply don’t run properly in version 6 and they can’t figure out why.

Of course most users have embraced the new version as there is simply too much new functionality to do otherwise. Some people, however, have minor problems with version 6 that might not be show stoppers but are definitely annoying. One such problem was reported to me today by a user who was missing the “Evaluate Notebook” option that used to be present in the menu of version 5.2.

Fortunately things like this are easily fixed. Within a standard Mathematica install, there is a file called MenuSetup.tr which defines what appears on the menus. On my Windows system it appears in the following location

C:\Program Files\Wolfram Research\Mathematica\6.0\SystemFiles\FrontEnd\TextResources\Windows\MenuSetup.tr

To get “Evaluate Notebook” to appear in the “Evaluation” part of the menu just modify this file by adding the line

Item[“Evaluate &Notebook”, “EvaluateNotebook”],

after the part that reads

Menu[“E&valuation”,
{

Let me know if you find this useful.

  1. Oliver
    July 16th, 2008 at 14:15
    Reply | Quote | #1

    I tried to do it but if I want to save the changes, I get an error warning. I can only save it as .txt-file, not as .tr-file. Did anzone else have this problem or is there an easy way to solve this promblem?

  2. admin
    July 16th, 2008 at 16:43
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Oliver, which operating system are you using?

  3. Oliver
    July 16th, 2008 at 23:33
    Reply | Quote | #3

    currently it’s Windows Vista

  4. admin
    July 17th, 2008 at 19:22
    Reply | Quote | #4

    Oliver – sorry but I don’t have access to a machine running Vista and I have never used it so I can’t really help.

    Mike

  5. Hideya
    August 29th, 2008 at 01:57
    Reply | Quote | #5

    Mike
    That works! Thanks! Oliver, if you look ” very carefully, you may be using different charactor. Webpage may have different font set. You can try retyping them.
    Hideya

  6. Hugh
    January 6th, 2009 at 21:45
    Reply | Quote | #6

    Cool – thanks. Works on Linux.

    The MenuSetup.tr file is in this directory in the default install:

    /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/SystemFiles/FrontEnd/TextResources/

    – Hugh.

  7. chedonat
    January 22nd, 2009 at 21:47
    Reply | Quote | #7

    Thanks, that’s fine..
    One trick for vista, just save the file MenuSetup.tr in another location than the original one (in the desktop for exemple), then copy it manually and past it back in the right location by replacing the old MenuSetup.tr