Change "active"citations to normal text

Hi everybody

I’m using Endnote X4 together with  Microsoft Word 2011 (MAC). If I open a wordfile containing “active” Endote citations (meaning if you click on them it brings you automatically to the end of your document, showing you the full citation ( your bibliography?)) with open office I can’t see any of my citations. How can I change the “active” citations to normal text so that I can see them in open office?

Thank you very much

Michi

From the EndNote Knowledge Database (Article #107124; 5/5/2011):

EndNote, EndNote Web, Reference Manager and ProCite: Open Office removes Microsoft Word field codes from documents
EndNote, EndNote Web, Reference Manager and ProCite use Microsoft Word’s field codes to communicate with the document and create a formatted in text citation and bibliography. Unfortunately Open Office does not have support for Microsoft Word’s field codes. When you open and save a document created in Microsoft Word in Open Office, the field codes are removed. 

This is a limitation of the Open Office software and is not likely to change.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused and would hope that users with this issue request Microsoft Word field code support from the Open Office team: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Feature:Requests

Hi CrazyGecko,

thanks for the answer. But is there a way to change my active citation to normal text?

If by “normal” you mean you want the EndNote field codes removed from the document all you need to do is select the “Convert to Plain Text” option. But once the citations are converted to plain text the EndNote field codes are gone permanently so you won’t be able to link them back to the EndNote library unless each citation is re-inserted. So make a backup file copy before converting the document to text.

The “Convert to Plain Text” option may be found in the EndNote tab in the MS Word ribbon. Locate the “Bibliography” section and click “Convert Citations and Bibliography” then click “Convert to Plain Text”.

Google Docs has the same problem - it loses field codes.

If by normal, you mean unformatted citations that can be converted by EndNote later, you can Convert to Unformatted Citations. This changes all the citations to a text only format something like {Biggs 2000 #23}. You can type references in this format by hand. Next time you use a word processor that does talk to EndNote you can Update Citations and Bibliography.  Alternatively, you can use EndNote’s Format Paper feature to convert them from temporary citations to formatted citations in a new document.

Mary-Ann