Not a Valid Action error

Hello. We are using EndNote X9 with MS Word that is part of MS Office 365. The document we are having problems with is a chapter with section breaks, page breaks, and headings, but no specified document style as it will be part of a larger work later.

This chapter was sent by email and reviewed by another person and returned by email. Now, when adding a new citation from EndNote, or updating the citations and bibliography, an error message box comes up stating “This is not a valid action for the end of a row.” In both instances the “Updating bibliography” box comes up and runs endlessly until I close it. When inserting the citation, the citation inserts after I close the error box and the updating bibliography closes, but no reference is added in the reference list.

We think the document may have been corrupted when the other person used it or in sending it by email.

Any thoughts about what might be the problem and any solution from any of you?

I appreciate the help.

Sincerely, Kitty

I suspect so too.  If they opened and saved it in another program, for example openoffice?  Best to unformat your previous version to temporary citations and compare to their version (you can try the same - unformating if possible).  Then accept the changes they made that you want to keep, and reject changes to all your temporary citations. (or use theirs as the primary and your old one as the secondary, so you do the opposite to get the same outcome - easier if few changes made by collaborator).   Then save to a new name and update citations and bibliography.  Next time you may want to share a copy of the paper in the unformated state.  You could copy and paste plain text of the reference list into an unformated copy of the document so they can see the references.  I actually have an output style that gives the “label” field, which is usually the pubmed number, so you can update it later from any library with those records downloaded from pubmed.  the temporary citation preferences can be changed to do this - see attached image.  



I suspect so too.  If they opened and saved it in another program, for example openoffice?  Best to unformat your previous version to temporary citations and compare to their version (you can try the same - unformating if possible).  Then accept the changes they made that you want to keep, and reject changes to all your temporary citations. (or use theirs as the primary and your old one as the secondary, so you do the opposite to get the same outcome - easier if few changes made by collaborator).   Then save to a new name and update citations and bibliography.  Next time you may want to share a copy of the paper in the unformated state.  You could copy and paste plain text of the reference list into an unformated copy of the document so they can see the references.  I actually have an output style that gives the “label” field, which is usually the pubmed number, so you can update it later from any library with those records downloaded from pubmed.  the temporary citation preferences can be changed to do this - see attached image.  

Please note to make a backup of your docuent before trying any of the steps below.

This message " This is not a valid action for the end of a row " typically appears with the tables. If you are ending any sections in your document with tables, this can cause the error message to appear. To avoid this, you can add some plain text after the table. You can always set the font to the same color as the page, so the text does not appear. If you are just printing the document, you can set the text to “Hidden.”

Alternatively, the message may appear if the table is corrupt. If you recently added a table to the document, you can try cutting it and adding it to a new document to see if you are able to format your document. If the issue is a corrupt table, you can always try re-creating the table manually. Alternatively, you can keep the tables in a separate document. When you are completely done working with EndNote in your document, you can use the “Convert Citations and Bibliography > Convert to Plain Text” command. That will create a new copy of your document that is no longer linked to EndNote. You can then add the tables to this new copy of the document.

If none of the steps above help to resolve the issue then please contact Technical Support directly

1-800-336-4474 option 4 then 1

or

https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/technicalsupport?language=en_US