I keep having a problem, which is specifically annoying, as I’m about to finish my thesis.
I am running a Win XP Prof. system (with all the latest updates installed), Microsoft Word 2007 (Student version) and Endnote X1. Several Weeks ago, Word started to crash during Cite While You Write operations. It usually crashed that moment I hit Alt+7 to get into the “Find Citations…” dialogue. Sometimes it also happens when I right-click on an already existing In-Text-Citation and choose “Edit Citation”. The error message says “Unknown Error”.
The crashes appear occasionally and don’t seem to be dependent on a particular pattern (e.g… other opened programs, a certain citation, time, date, etc.). There’s sometimes days without any problems and on some days I have to restart word and endnote three or four times. Is that a known issue? How can I fix this problem?
I have been looking through the posts in the forum but I didn’t find anything that seemed to relate to my problem.
Does this only happen in the thesis? Is it a long document with lots of inserted figures, tables, tracked changes, etc?
If this were me, I would first make and copy and on the copy, unformat all the references to their curly bracketed state, delete the residual bibliography, and be sure to accept any tracked changes and then remove field codes. While the “phenotype” is different, see this FAQfor the steps.
I might also remove the autogenerated tables of contents. figures etc.if present. (the steps above may convert them to non-updatable text anyway). They can be reinsert after cleaning up the codes.
Additional tricks for theses:
I always suggest that my students wait to insert the figures until they are at the end of the writing process, so they can insert them in the best places for page placement, etc. This also avoids having a huge document. I suggest that you save your figures as .PNGs if possible before inserting into the word document. Insert them in a frame with the figure legend captions and not in a box, if you want them to show up in a Table of Figures (and if you want to include any endnote references in them).
Are you using templates and outline mode or header structure to mark items that will end up in Table of Contents (you can also auto number chapters and figures based on chapters using word capabilities and generate Table of Figures and Table of Tables)? It makes your life a lot easier, especially if you learn how to do this at the beginning of writing and not try to apply it all at the end.
Finally, you may want to show Paragraph symbols and copy everything except the very last paragraph symbol into a clean new document. This last may be a hold over from earlier versions of word, which had a lot of hidden document specific stuff there. I don’t know if it really helps with more recent versions of word, but I am a creature of habit.