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If they do this, I never need to use a M$ product again

The sole reason that I have any Microsoft products on my machine at all, is compatibility with Endnote. Once upon a time, Endnote was equally capable with a number of word and document processors, but now it only works with Word or by scanning RTF, which is a Bad Format and routinely messes up document structures.

Oh, I tried various other bibliographic systems, like BibTeX, but none of them did what I wanted, or lost data that I had in my (now 7000 record) Endnote db.

There have been functional replacements for Werd Wierd Word for some time now. Even Apple’s Pages is pretty good for my purposes. But to format the references, you had to save to RTF, scan, and reopen, blah, blah…

So OpenOffice have announced that they are writing a bibliographical database application fromt he ground up, fully functional in OpenOffice (and hence its local versions like the nice NeoOffice for Mac), which is planned to be better than Endnote. For a start, it seems it will allow you to manage the styles within the WP live. There’s a hack for Endnote that does this, but it’s kludgy and hangs the word processor for a few seconds. Given the nature of computer programs, I have never understood why there’s not an Endnote API for all WP programmers to include it natively.

By the end of 2008, I can scrub all M$ slime off my hard disk, I hope. And I can start to work the way I should, intuitively.

17 Comments

  1. Looks like you’ll have to wait about a year for the OpenOffice upgrade, but they seem quite serious about it. Sun Microsystems will continue to have a special place in my heart for making OpenOffice a true open source project.

  2. And it will work with BibTeX format too. Cool.

  3. I use Reference Manager with WordPerfect. It works really well.
    I’ve never found a WP that’s better than WordPerfect for the kinds of writing I do most frequently.

  4. John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

    WP on the Mac was great, but it didn’t survive the OS X leap. And after some company bought it, I forget who, it died in the arse.

  5. Not an EndNote user – and currently using Google Notebook – admittedly kludgy for keeping/inserting references – and code snippets.
    I’ll now cop to age and obscurity by saying that I miss the academic word processor Nota Bene – Dragonfly Software, I think, made it. And recent versions of WordPerfect – running under XP – inevitably accompanied by mysterious and frequent crashes. My bought-and-paid-for WordPerfect sits, unused – but not unmissed.

  6. John Vreeland John Vreeland

    Word 1.0 had one new feature that made it very promising: it treated paragraphs as objects, which made it very intuitive to use for object-oriented programmers like myself. Oddly enough, that mentality was actually quite alien to Microsoft and it has been a downhill slide for Word ever since.

  7. David Marjanović David Marjanović

    What does a programmer do with Word???
    Also, the support for special characters has always been going up, up, up. Even though on the Mac it took till Word 2004 till it got halfway serious.

  8. roger roger

    Not exactly Endnote, but check out “Papers” – it’s great software for organizing and working with academic articles: http://mekentosj.com/papers/
    I use it everyday (along with Skim).
    Cheers,
    Roger

  9. Bob Dowling Bob Dowling

    What does a programmer do with Word???

    documentation? tutorials? progress reports?
    Programmers aren’t restricted to only use emacs, you know. Some of them use vi too. 😎

  10. Endnote is a hideous, over-priced, underfunctional mess. I predict a landslide of users to Openoffice once this comes out, if it works as predicted.
    No real bones to me, mind you; I made the shift to LaTeX and Bibtex when Openoffice was still floundering in painful infancy, and I’m almost entirely deprogrammed now. I find trying to use a word processor almost physically painful these days. “Daddy, why’s it called a word processor?” “Well, Jimmy, you’ve seen what a food processor does to food”.
    🙂

  11. OK…full disclosure. I am with RefWorks, as web-based bibliographic product. RefWorks is compatible with native Open Office documents. You can try it out at http://www.refworks.com (and my apologies for the quasi-commercial nature of this message).

  12. John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

    I don’t want to replace a product (that I get free from the university) with a product that is equivalent (even if the interface is better). I want a product that is properly integrated into the editor, and which behaves transparently. Endnote’s integration with Wurd is evil, but useable.
    One reader, Eli G, suggested that I might find Bookends useful, so I have downloaded the demo and am fiddling with it. It looks like it will take the Endnote db without problems, though I have to do some more mucking about with PDF-attached records to tell. But even that as an external app is messy, so I’ll probably wait for the OO attempt before deciding, as I can get Endnote X to work (unlike versions 6-8) without trouble and have edited styles for the journals I submit to. Bookends works integratedly with Mellel, a really nice two-byte editor (I occasionally pretend to write Greek with accents; Wurd is really hard put to do this, so I sometimes drop into TeX or Pages, do it there, and put the result as PDF back in Waerd), but that entails two new purchases. And still I am unsure if they can handle Revision Tracking in Wird files.
    So: Word.

  13. EndNote version X1 supports native Open Office (.ODT) documents.

  14. Does it also export Bibtex files that actually work in Bibtex (i.e. have a unique key for each entry)?

  15. John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

    Dear Endnote [I’ve never spoken to a software package before, at least not in public and without four letter words], while I have your attention, here are some suggestions:
    A styles editor that allows you to easily edit styles with visual feedback.
    A styles manager that allows you to search styles by typing in an example, so you can figure out what a journal uses.
    A “smart paste” for parsing copied references in the right fields.
    I’ll think of more. You can email me for further suggestions.

  16. Good news and bad news:
    The OO Bib project has been “announced” many times over several years and never seems to go anywhere.
    Good news #1.. On Linux, “bibus” works very nicely and is in many ways better than endnote. It may or may not be what you nened.
    Good news #2.. for a small fee, you can put Crossover on your Linux machine, and it will run Endnote (possibly version N-1, where N is most current) just fine.
    I’ve done both, both work, I had the same exact criterion as you (with 12,000 references on Endnote), and the moment I figured out I did not need Windows to manage my bib, Windows went out the Window.

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