Taking too long to update citations and then Word crashes

Hello,

I am writing my thesis using MS Word (Office Pro Plus 2013) and Endnote X7.7.1 for citations and bibliography. I have the latest updates for Endnote.

I wrote the whole thing (with 244 references) with unformatted citations and the function “Instant Formatting” off. This was to make the writing easier.

Now that I have finished with the content, I cilck on “Update Citacions and Bibliography” to convert all the citations to the formatted versions and create the bilbiography. This process takes hours. The majority of times, the progress just stops and when I want to cancel Word jus crashes. Once, it took two hours but at least at the end it worked and I got the document with updated citations.

The problem is that now, when I want to do any change like remove a reference or so, the update again goes through this process, taking hours just to crash Word at the end.

It is not the case that Endnote is waiting for some input from my side. I check Endnote status while updating and it does not require such input.

This is really annoying. Especially now that I am so far into my thesis. Is anybody experiencing something similar and can give me some advice? 

Thanks in advance,

JC

It sounds like something is seriously wrong.  – Are there large numbers of tracked changes?  – can you make a copy and accept tracked changes and try again?  

Hi Leanne,

Thank you for your reply. I assume you are referring to MS Word’s changes from the “Review” tab. I have not added any revisions to the document, so I could not see any markups.

Nevertheless I did what you recommended, I created a copy of the DOCX, accepted tracked changes and tried to update the citations and bibliography again. This time, at least Word did not crash at the end and it did update the citations. However, it still took 1/2 hour to do it. I did some other change later in the day and again, took 1 hr and then crashed.

Regards,

JC

Assuming you still have the library – (on a copy, which goes without saying)  I would go thru the steps in this KB article to ensure you don’t have any corruptions in the document interferring with Endnote’s fieldcodes.  http://endnote.com/kb/81143

Hi,

I do have my libraries with me and Endnote opened while I attempt anything. I have followed those steps, and this is the record of what happened:

  • Time to unformat citations in the old DOCX :3m10s

  • Once the citations are unformatted, something strange happened this time. The unformatted citations appear 5 times each throughout the whole document, e.g.

{Phadke, 2006 #155;Phadke, 2006 #155;Phadke, 2006 #155;Phadke, 2006 #155;Phadke, 2006 #155}. 

  • I delete the hidden fields with [Ctrl]+6. It was immediate.

  • After copying all the text in a new DOCX, all the text formatting was messed up (which is not surprising with Word, but this makes me thing this is not a good solution since the document is very large).

  • When Updating the citations and Bibliography in the new DOCX, again it took forever. Something that happens in between the process is:

— I have some pieces of code in my Appendixes with brackets {}. I can notice that Endnote interprets these as unformatted citations and tries to format them, as per the attached image. For all such cases I select IGNORE one by one. Sorry I did not mention this before. Not sure if it is relevant or not. Anyway, after I finish quickly to Ignore such fields, the formatting process resumes.

— This time, it took 39m00s45 to reformat and it did not crash at the end, but did not format the citations either. Instead, I got this message:

“The specified range is not from the correct document or story”

With the only option of “Ok”, and all the citations remain in the unformatted mode. Try again the process, all the same again.

It seems there are more issues in there every time I look into something…

 Regards,

JC

this suggests there was a corruption: 

  • Once the citations are unformatted, something strange happened this time. The unformatted citations appear 5 times each throughout the whole document, e.g.

 

{Phadke, 2006 #155;Phadke, 2006 #155;Phadke, 2006 #155;Phadke, 2006 #155;Phadke, 2006 #155}. 

 

I never do this step, as I don’t find it necessary.  Pasting - change the paste option with the little clippy thingy to the first option, from source, if you need to copy it all to a new document:

 

  • After copying all the text in a new DOCX, all the text formatting was messed up (which is not surprising with Word, but this makes me thing this is not a good solution since the document is very large).

 

You should change endnotes default temporary delimiters to something other than the curly brackets. Any unique pair of characters will do, square brackets might work, or ^& or @# or someother pair on the keyboard.  – this can be done in the format bibliography menu, or in the endnote program preferences for all documents.  This could be the problem:  

 

— I have some pieces of code in my Appendixes with brackets {}. I can notice that Endnote interprets these as unformatted citations and tries to format them, as per the attached image. For all such cases I select IGNORE one by one. Sorry I did not mention this before. Not sure if it is relevant or not. Anyway, after I finish quickly to Ignore such fields, the formatting process resumes.

 

 

one last thing, I always have the auto url link disabled unless I have a good reason to need it.  

Hello,

I am not very certain of the definition of “corruption”. It makes sense intuitively that the problem is some corruption in the Word document, but maybe you could specify a little more on that definition so I can look for something to resolve it?

When I paste into a new Word document, I do use the Special Paste options, and from them I choose “Formatted Tex ”, but still all the formats of my original thesis are not preserved. Is that what you meant before?

Ok, now this is what I did. I changed the Endnote temporary delimiters to something very unique: ¿ !

Then I repeated all the process above: Unformatted citations in the old DOCX (8m31s35). Again,  each one of the unformatted citations looks like this:

¿Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241!

It repeats 9 times each now! It seems every time I unformat, it adds a new one (even though is a different copy of the original DOCX)

Got rid of the hidden fields with CTRL+6, passed to a new DOCX and reformatted. This time it took 14m23s92 and it did work. All the citations were formatted.

However,

If I want to edit something in the new documents (with a lot of work to do in recovering my text formatting that got lost), this process must be repeatable. Hence, a second run:

Unformat in this new DOCX: 4m47s52, and each reference looks like:

¿Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241;Rodriguez, 2014 #241!

I reformat in this new DOCX, after CTRL+6:, then

-At 3m51s03, I got the message “this command is not available”, then the message “Cannot edit range,”and the process aborts.

-I try to reformat again: At 4m58s20 I got the message “The specified range is not from the correct document or story”… and then I find that the citations did format, but strange bugs appear are all over the place (image attached). It seems the problem is still there. This is frustating. btw I appreciate your help with this.

Regards,

P.S. I also chose the option in Word not to show hyperlinks (if that is what you meant before)

No image was attached

P.S. response.  clarification: I turn off the “Link in-text citations to references in the bibliography”. (see attachment) so yes, if that is what you meant you turned off.  

You need to contact (recommend you call) tech support.  I am just another user, and it appears that there is something wrong beyond the advice I can give without sitting down next to you.  Unless you are in the Kansas City area, that ain’t gonna happen!  

Someone needs to look at your document.  Sorry I can’t help more.  
Capture.JPG

Hi,

Alright. Thanks for your help anyway. I have contacted tech support.