Relinking references to Word Doc

I submitted my thesis with the references unlinked and saved to plain text because I had a couple of references that no matter what I did I couldn’t get them to work properly in text.  I now have to make amendments to the document and have tried using convert word citations to endnote but nothing happens.  Any other suggestions in how to relink the references?  There are hundreds of them and I will need to insert more so I really need to have endnote working properly.  I upgraded from a previous version to Endnote X8 since handing in the document and am wondering if this is causing the problem although all my references are in X8.

Not seemlessly, no.  

What is the current style of the thesis?  numbered?  Author in alphabetical order?  output style name? 

Thanks for replying.  The thesis is in 6th Harvard, references alphabetical order, in-text citations author et al and year.  

Is the problem because I upgraded Endnote?

No - it is because you converted to “plain text” which removes all endnote coding.  If you have a previous version of the Word document, prior to converting to plain text, you might try reverting that to “convert to unformated citations” and compare it to your current version.  Then you would have to carefully go thru the document accepting all your more recent changes and rejecting your your citations to retain the curly bracketed versions.  That would restore your citations in the endnote format. 

– finally tell us what your specific issues were, so we might be able to solve those to, avoiding subsequent editing of the text citations or bibliography?   As you note - you can’t edit them on the fly, you need to adjust endnote, so it produces what you want.   

I had problems with two references that would not convert to the correct format in-text.  I tried all sorts of ways to overcome it; deleting the record and remaking it (a number of times) either by using google scholar to create the record or by inputting the information my self, carefully looking at all the settings - nothing would make the in-text citations work despite a number of hours on these two citations.  Since they were very important citations the only way around the problem was to convert to plain and then fix up the problem.

The better way to have done it (without knowing what the specific problem was and fixing the source of the problem) would have been to edit the citation (right click using endnote tools and exclude author and year).  This would make the citation itself, disappear, but would still include it at that position and in the bibliography –  and type exactly what you want to appear.  

My preferred way is to actually use word tools to select the incorrect intext citation and format it as hidden text (cause then with my display settings I can still see it) and type exactly what I want to appear next to it.