"EndNote X2 EndNote Error"

I upgraded to Windows 2007 and EndNote X2 hoping to resolve this. I have a large manuscript (369 pages) as a master document in Word, with twelve chapters as subdocuments. I had used EndNote and Cite While You Write to enter references. When I ask EndNote to update the citations, the progress bar gets a bit beyond a third of the way and then I get the remarkably uninformative pop-up: EndNote X2  EndNote Error.

Am I asking EndNote to do more than it is capable of? 

Bob Wengert

University of Illinois 

Solved my problem. I saw the note that programming code containing braces, as C and Java contain, can confuse EndNote. I went through the code examples I have and changed braces to double-brackets as a temporary measure. EndNote now reformatted the footnotes and bibliography.  I could have changed EndNote’s symbol for temporary citations to something like double-braces, but I had fewer code examples; changing them was easier.

It is a relief to know that EndNote will handle the many references. 

I had a similar error message here. In my case, the error was caused by a special character (an em dash or something like that). When I removed this character, formatting worked fine again.

Again, this is another example, generic “Endnote error” message doesn’t help users. I agree it is described as “remarkably uninformative pop-up”.

Software doesn’t show error messages randomly. There should be algorithms checking something based on some criteria, to trigger the error message. So, the error checking algorithm needs to provide more information why and where the error occured, of course with some possible alternatives. Error messages could include some error codes such that users can find where to go, maybe link to database in the web.

Developers shouldn’t say “Oh, there are simply too many possibilities that could cause this type of error.”

Message Edited by myoshigi on 12-17-2009 01:06 PM