I’m glad to find I’m not the only one who finds the Rating field annoying! I vote to enable suppression. And I have more complaints.
My company has been using EndNote for about 10 years. We use EndNote rather differently from the typical academic user. Our main corporate library has over 16,000 records, and we do not attach PDFs to EndNote. We have one person entering references into the master library, and use server scripts to create and distribute a copy of the library to each user when they log in every day.
We just upgraded from X2 to X6, and I’m very pleased with several new features—right-clicking for Author (year) format, hyperlinking between in-text citations and the reference list, and the “document library” group showing all references currently in an open document.
However, X6 is cluttered with new features that are not useful to us and quite distracting:
1 The “read/unread” feature, which displays references in bold until one opens the record, is visually distracting and very hard on the eyes. Do I really have to open up 16,000 existing references, some of which have been in our library FOREVER, just to unbold them? I discovered how to disable the feature, but not how to unbold all my references.
2 The library toolbar is cluttered with many buttons that my users will never use (particularly EndNote Web, which will not accommodate our large library), and the one button they DO use, Insert Citation, has become difficult to find. EndNote X2 had a button with a huge red arrow on it that you could see from across the room. I’d love the ability to customize that toolbar and remove some icons. And bring back the big red arrow, please!
3 I’m not all that impressed with Unfiled Groups, either; we’ve been using the Label field for years to connect references with their projects, and don’t really need any help there. We do have quite a few Smart Groups, and if I could remove Unfiled Groups, My Groups, and Find Full Text from the Groups pane I’d have room for more. Can the Groups pane be made more editable than it is?
Kay Hessemer
User in Seattle