EndNote for Word 2016 for Mac.

Honestly Jason,

I know it’s your job, etc, etc. But don’t treat us like fools, stop your carefully selected words pre-approved by your Public Relations director and tell us the truth. You know that Thomson Reuters and the EndNote team are a bunch of lazy geezers who didn’t want to review the new Word version during the many, many months that has been out. And you didn’t do it not because you couldn’t do it (TR has the resources and the human power to accomplish great things) but because for TR EndNote users are second or third class citizens.

You don’t care for the service you provide to us but the money you bill us. So at least have the decency to be honest with honest with us: Thomson Reuters and its EndNote division do not care.

Honesty is always the best policy, Jason.

Tell that to your Public Relations manager that, Jason. And Jason, we all know that you really don’t care about what we say or how angry we are at your incompetence, for we are only a bunch of crazies ranting in a secluded forum in one obscure Internet site. So long as we don’t take to Twitter and a reporter from the NYT pics up our story on the disregard that the all-powerful TR has for its clients you won’t really care. So rest assure, Jason, that we will keep paying and you will get yet another pat on the shoulder from the Public Relations manager and maybe a bonus too fro handling so well this issue.

In the meantime Mendeley is, by far, the best option for a useful, constantly updated reference manager.

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Why not we raise our voice to boycott Endnote

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whyy does it take sooo looong?

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Steve from Mendeley here. We’ve just gone through (very likely) the exact same problems that Endnote have been going through while trying to get our plugin working with Mac Word 2016 (now released, though still has a few outstanding issues we’re working through before wide launch), and wanted to weigh in with a few points.

  1. It’s really really hard to work with the new Word 2016 as a developer.  The visual basic editor provided for working with and debugging VBA code in 2016 are not developer friendly, for example, there’s no search tool to find things in the code, no line numbers, and it’s unstable.  It’s not at all developer friendly.

  2. Word 2016 doesn’t let developers easily add buttons to a toolbar with VBA, though 2011 does, meaning interface changes all need to be compiled against 2011, then ported to 2016 from there.

  3. When you’re working with such big unknowns and a huge number of bugs to wade through, there’s no good way of saying ‘It’ll be done by X’, it’s either in progress, working, or not working.  Features from scratch tend to be much easier to estimate, but anything where you’re heavily reliant on integrating with another piece of software, built by other developers in another company isn’t easy to estimate.

  4. Microsoft doesn’t give developers a heads-up for when they’re releasing things.  When the previews were released, there were show-stopping issues right up until about beta 3, and the final release came about a month before we were expecting it to.  All we had been given to go on was “Probably Q3” for final release, and turns out it was like the first week of Q3.

  5. “Apps for office” is the new thing that MS are trying to push as a replacement for VBA, so they’re not really fixing VBA bugs, however Apps for office has shortcomings that make developing a complex plugin with the same functionality as our existing plugins impossible at this time.  It puts us all in a weird state of limbo.

Transparency is hard.  Mendeley is trying to improve on it with our experiment in public roadmaps ( trello.com/b/0EHJ5pXg/mendeley-development-public ) , but it’s difficult to get approval in vast organisations such as Elsevier or Thompson Reuters.

Obviously, I’ll say that there are many reasons to use Mendeley over Endnote, but try not to give the developers a hard time over difficult problems that are largely out of their control.  A large part of the responsibility is on Microsoft here, please take that into account.

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Steve - 

I really appreciate you taking the time to explain the developers situation to the Endnote users on this forum.  Its a shame that Microsoft, probably the largest software company in the world, cannot develop better tools for its colleagues, but I can’t say I am surprised.

We don’t use Word and Endnote because we want to, we use them because we have to.  We have 10-12 authors on each paper these days, and Endnote is the de facto standard that everyone has on their machine.

Both apps have been getting better on the Mac prior to this set back, and the iPad Endnote app is a good step forward.

Lets hope TR’s folks can use your example and run it up the chain so that they can be more transparent in the future about their progress.

Folks - vitriol is unnecessary and accomplishes nothing.

Take care,

John

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Steve, thank you so much for your input. You’ve hit the nail on the head; the situation is definitely complex. That said, we’re putting our all into a solution that will best support the strong Cite While You Write functionality we know everyone relies on.

As soon as there is an update we will be sharing it. For now, our developers have put their noses to the grindstone and are focused on getting a workable solution out as soon as they possibly can.

Thank you again, Steve, and also thank you for the feedback from all who have been impacted by this difficult compatibility issue. We truly appreciate all your input, and again, we will keep you informed!

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Thanx for a forthright reply. My subscription is current, but apparently I missed the most recent notification for the update. Can TR establish a sign-up of some sort for notification when the MS Office 2016 patch becomes available.

TY

Les

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You are taking too long to resolve this compatibility issue…


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Can’t do the job? Then quit, or at least stop robbing us from our money for a mediocre subpar product which you don’t have the ability nor the will to maintain. Excuses.

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Please read the previous note from developers. As they clearly stated it will take time because of the difficulties of working with Microsoft. 

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We are now into September - are there any updates about the specific timetable to make the patch available for Word 2016?  To know the specific date of the release would be very helpful.

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Thanks for your note to us Gillian.  Having just had to go through producing two documents by going back to Word 2011, this is not a good workaround.  There are better formatting options for figures in 2016, and these get moved around and the whole document gets restructured.  This is really not a good workaround for now.

Please release the beta patch as soon as possible so we can begin testing it (even if it crashes occasionally its better than having to go back to 2011 for every doc to format the bibliography.)

Take care,

John

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My company is in a holding-pattern regarding deploying Office 2016 to our 250+ Macs. Our IT effort to migrate everyone from a static site licensing model to Office 365 has been stopped until we can fully support Word 2016 & CWYW. Hear that sound? Its the sound of our project screeching to a halt.

I’d really like to offer myself to beta testing the forthcoming EndNote X7 Word 2016 CWYW plug-in.

I signed-up for the Thomson EndNote beta test program.

The Thomson beta test sign-up form is beyond horrible. It was litterally useless. It has been abandoned for years.

• The versions of EndNote are outdated.

• The versions of Mac OS X are outdated.

• The versions of Microsoft Word are outdated.

Thomson need beta testers to beta test their own beta testing. Wow - that’s meta!

I mentioned this to Thomson three times over several months in the form of support tickets.  I am dissaponted that Thomson is becoming an Internet slum-lord.

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Thanks for bringing this to my attention.  We haven’t hosted a Beta program since the launch of X7 in 2013 and I imagine this form is from that program.  We unitentionally left it active. 

However, we are planning a Beta program form the new CWYW for Word.  Would you mind contacting me directly at ariana.townsend[at]thomsonreuters.com?

In the meantime, I will sort out thee existing form.  I apologize for not doing so sooner.

~Ariana Townsend

Thomson Reuters

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Dear all,

It is nearly mid-september. Any news about the patch for word 2016 on mac?

@admin: any hint on the approximate date?

@community: what is the best way to keep posted about the release?

Thanks.

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I’m am about to undertake a substantial research project and have a large amount of reference on the system which are now useless, unless an update is released asap.

Do we have any updates? Even Beta Updates would be something.

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By stating that you are “planning” a beta trial, does that mean that there isn’t one already? In other words, we’re not even close to a release date if a beta is still in the “planning” stage. 

With all due respect, the lack of transparency and coy references to a “fall release” are somewhat insulting. You are going to gain more ground with your loyal customer base by acknowledging the black eye instead of trying to cover it up with makeup and pretend that it’s not there.

BTW, the Windows version of Office 2016 goes public in 9 days. Is there a plan or that? If there is your customers certainly wouldn’t know at this rate.

Please be more transparent out of respect for the people paying your salaries.

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Please friends, dont expect any sorts of professionalism and accountability from TR. I am still using Endnote, because I have prepared my PhD theis using it; otherwise there is no reason to stick with endnote. It is a very useful software, but now a days, we also need prompt customer service that TR fails to provide.

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I’m glad to hear that EndNote X7 CWYW will (eventually) be compatabile with Word 2016, without requiring customers to buy EndNote X8 (or whatever the next major verison of EndNote will be named).

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Another voice in the chorus to get this taken care of!

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