Strange behavior with Word

One of our students (who is using EndNote X3 and Word 2008 on a Mac) has encountered a problem that baffles me. She is writing a thesis using a locally modified version of APA style…we modified it to include Archival materials in a format required by her professor. In EndNote X2 it worked just fine. She upgraded to X3 today and has encountered this problem…most book and article references show up in her Word document just fine, but the archival references either come in blank or display only a period. In the EndNote preview pane the archival references look fine and have all required information. In Word, when we click on Format Citations, the information is correct there as well. Anyone have any idea why this won’t display in Word?

Thanks!

Mike Van Houten

When you modify a reference type you need to save/export the changes as an .xml file which, in your student’s case, would have to be imported after she upgraded to EndNote X3.  [Go to the EndNote toolbar, select EDIT, PREFERENCES, then see the middle part of the preferences window referring to “Reference Type Table”.] Since the modification was made only to accommodate “Achival” references it would not affect the standard references (i.e., books, journal articles, etc.).

Unless your student exported/saved a copy of the .xml file she’ll need to recreate the “Archival” reference type and output style.

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In my experience upgrading retains the user altered reference types table, but it may be that the modified APA style has been overwritten or is not in an accessible folder location?  First check that the paper is using the style you think it is. If you reformat the paper, click on the output style can you find it via the style manager and  reselect it?  I suspect that this is the case if you see the correctly formatted reference in the preview window (with the same output style selected?).  If not available, is the modified APA style still somewhere else, and can you move it to the current installation’s preferences’ defined Output styles folder?  (I work with windows, so there may be some differences to this in the Mac version). 

But I am not exactly sure what is reflected in your final comments.  How can it work in Word but not display in Word?

@mike Van Houten wrote:

In Word, when we click on Format Citations, the information is correct there as well. Anyone have any idea why this won’t display in Word?

 

Thanks very much…this solved the problem! We appreciate your quick response!

Mike