I am writing a help page for our users, covering this. I find that references are not exported in the chosen style and not in the chosen order.
I have sorted the references by author Z to A, just clicking on the heading (I also tried References > Sort). I chose one of our own styles. The resulting text file uses the style, but has references sorted A to Z by author.
On another occasion, I selected Vancouver but the resulting file was in some sort of delimited format.
I think the answers to your questions are in the existing help result for “Exporting” in Endnote X4:
Exporting bibliographies from EndNote is easy and flexible. When you export from a library, EndNote creates a file of references formatted according to the chosen style.
You can export either all of the references in the current references list, or only the selected (highlighted) references in the current list. If any references in the Library window are selected, the EndNote export dialog gives you the option of exporting just those selected references.
To export a bibliography from EndNote:
Open the library from which you will export, and show the references you want to export.
To export all of the references in the library, click the All References group or choose Show All References from the References menu.
To export a subset of references, display a group or use the Search Library, Hide Selected References, or Show Selected References commands to show the subset of references you want to include. You can further limit the list of references to export by highlighting just those references in the current list.
(Optional) References will be exported in the order specified by the selected output style. If you want to change the sort order, you must modify the output style:
From the Edit menu, choose Output Styles and then Open Style Manager.
Select the output style and click Edit.
In the left pane of the window, under Bibliography, select Sort Order.
Change the current sort order in the right pane. If you want to export references in the order in which they are listed in the current Library window, choose Order of appearance.
Close the output style and the style manager.
From EndNote’s File menu, choose Export.
From the “Save File as Type” list at the bottom of the dialog, select the type of file to be exported.
From the “Output style” list at the bottom of the dialog, choose a style (or choose “Select another style” to choose from all available output styles).
Select the “Export Selected References” option if desired. If you want to export all of the references in the current list, clear the check box.
Enter a name for the exported file and use the Save in list to specify where it should be saved and use the triangle button to allow you to browse to the appropriate folder and specify where the file should be saved.
Yes, we used to do that too. But people can copy the ones they need to a location they have control over and change their preferences to point there I guess. The handling of two folders, user styles and shared styles, in X2 and later is really a great advantage which allows the best of both worlds.
but note that you need to customize the installation to redirect the “installed” folders to be located on a shared network drive rather than the default C: program folder location.