Having a challenge with converting the EndNote citations to plaintext. I’m using Mac and Office 365.
This is a masters thesis, so there are about ~800 citations throughout a ~200 page document that I have been working on for years. When I click “Tools” > “Convert to Plain Text”, Word gives me a pop-up box telling me that it will create a new document. I click “Yes” and it creates a new document.
At this point, it almost immediately gets stuck on “Converting Citations to Plain Text” (see attached). I’ve gone back through the “Edit & Manage Citations” function and cleaned up some rogue cites that had crept in over the years, but that hasn’t helped.
A couple of things I’m wondering:
Given the high number of citations, do I just need to let it run for a few hours?
At some point, some of the citations have been embedded in the “Travelling Library” rather than my regular EndNote library. Is that going to be an issue?
I would first export the travelling library – and save it to a new name for now.
I would then make a copy of the file and try to use word tools to convert to plain text? (replace command with Control, if you are on a PC)
Command-A (select all the text in the doc).
Command-Shift-F9 (changes all the field codes to text of just the results).
or
Command-A (select all the text in the doc).
Command-6 (changes all the field codes to text of just the results).
You will also lose the ability to update tables of contents and the like, but you could also only select the text of the document and not the front matter to run the word tool on.
If that still doesn’t work, you can try running the convert to temporary citations, and see if you spot any citations that don’t convert (they are usually the rogue ones), convert to plain text (or use the word tool above) and then reformat, but you might need that travelling library to update them back to citations.
Then you may be able to run the endnote tool or the word tool to remove the fields.
