My company uses X3 with Windows XP, and we house our output styles on a central drive that only one person can access. She creates styles and then we push them to each user’s C drive periodically. This creates a problem with newer Windows operating systems, which don’t allow write access to C drive.
We decided to experiment with changing our folder location preferences to point straight to the central network drive instead of our C drives (in anticipation of an upcoming move to Vista).
When we changed the folder locations, and then went to format a bibliography, the “Choose a style” pop-up now has 2 of each style, and in the bottom of the pop-up window, it says that it’s looking on the C drive still.
It seems that it’s looking on the C drive and the network drive. What’s going on, and is there any way to get it to look only where you want it to, and not where you don’t?
Yes, due to changes to Windows Vista and 7, the default installation of the styles to the program folder created a few issues, and so they modified X2, X3 and X4, to utilize two folder locations, the “original” which defaults to the program folder location and the user modifiable which defaults to a My Documents location. It is the user modifiable that you change with the preferences. What you want is to modify the “installed styles” location default.
The instructions for doing that are in the Endnote.pdf manual - For X3 - it is on page 680 “Changing the Default Content File location”. If you can’t find the manual (P.S. which should be in the program folder/endnote folder – I found a copy to download here. The endnote.com site probably has one to download too, but this one came up in my google search first.) (P.P.S. I don’t know HOW to follow those instructions, I just passed them on to our IT guys!)
Doing this makes it SO much easier to maintain a current set of styles for our institute users, while users can mess around with a style to suit their needs with out affecting the main styles that everyone uses. As the person who used to have to make the changes request or download a new style for each user, and our “styles folder” then had to contain those personal styles as well as the set of journal commonly used by our scientists, now if someone wants to meddle with a style, or download a style for a publication not commonly needed by others, they can do so and save it to their preferences set location.
We have about 250 styles in the content default, – too many more than that, affects the Endnote programs performance (although I haven’t done an experiment to figure out how many is too many).
And yes, Endnote pulls the styles from the My Documents for that user as well as the “default content”.