EndNote 20 - infuriatingly slow and just not worth using

Problems with EndNote 20 (so far):

  1. Slow to respond - I’ve wasted so much time waiting for the database to respond that I am seriously considering re-installing EndNote 9 which was relatively trouble-free and worked as soon as it was opened.

  2. Not all references can be seen when viewed on a 14-inch laptop screen: if there are only a few references in a group, sometimes I can only see them when I view Endnote on a larger screen rather than my laptop (14 inch) screen. Surely the application should able to adjust to the screen size?

  3. I want to be able to edit a reference in a full screen, not just in the RH column.

  4. SO SLOW. Sorry, might have mentioned this before but it is infuriating.

  5. So diffierent to all the other versions, which worked well. Yes, this is a fancy screen but that doesn’t make up for the troubles with using it. I’ve even had to change the colour of my mouse arrow so that I can find it when using EndNote.

I share some of your same frustrations with EN20. And I wondered if I was the only one noticing that it was ridiculously sllllllooooowwww sometimes. Here is my latest posting (on the pdf question)…

EN 20 has become basically unusable!! The ONLY way to RELIABLY attach a pdf now is to open the database in EN19 and attach it (easily as usual). Then when you open EN20 it is all fine, but if you try to attach the SAME pdf in EN20, it never succeeds — when you immediately check it, it is there, but as soon as you save the record, it becomes an unopenable pdf.

Honestly, I have loved EN and I can not live without it, but I am tired of constantly fighting with EN20, and the silly behaviors that just drive me crazy and kill my productivity. Thank goodness the file format has not changed. I am going back to EN19, and recommending to my whole group and colleagues that they do the same until the next version is released that fixes all these annoyances.

Here is an email on other issues with EN20 that I hope get resolved soon…
Look, this is a little general, but EN 20 updates are always bug-ridden. In the latest, vs. 20.3, the following can be noted, for example…

  1. PDFs often refuse to attach; you have to export as a pdf from Preview and then they exported version may work! [The original opens just fine in Preview, but not in EN20]
  2. The main window doesn’t open with the same settings anymore! We have to reorder by, e.g., year, and scroll to the top every time we open it now!
  3. If you add a file or save a reference, the search screen is suddenly gone and you get the whole database window again – you have to search again to get back to the thing you were just working on!
    In general, I have to say that it looks like your testing is getting lax – all these things just creep in and are honestly annoying – they don’t destroy EN’s usefulness for us, but are certainly making it frustrating. Could you please try and do better testing before a release!? [I used to be a beta-tester for you (and in fact wrote an early reference manager, even supplying EndNote with my original import and export scripts!!!)

I’m curious as to what kind of hardware youre running. Im suffering on everything from a high end microsoft surface pro, an i9 gaming laptop with 32 gb of ram, and a monstrous 16 core workstation with 64 gb…

I have tried everything from moving the library to an NVME non cloud drive and upgrading my main machine, but it seems like whenever I get more than 30-40 citations thingy get chuggy when using CWYW on Word. While disabling instant formatting helps a teeny bit, it’s annoying when trying to visualize the document.