Dinishak.com MindBlog

All things between psychology and technology

May 6th, 2012

For some inexplicable reason, Endnote for PC does not like to play well with MicroSoft Word. Discussions with others have led me to believe this is a long standing issue.

What happens is that after inserting references, Endnote will mess up the citations even though it is set to conform to APA formatting. For example, as I am finishing editing my dissertation, I notice that many references will have the author’s first name spelled out (e.g., Steve Smith, 2000 instead of Smith, 2000). The problem arises when one tries to hand edit these mistakes that Endnote creates; Word will update the fields in your file and all the screwed up reference fields will go back to normal when you open up Endnote and your Word File. This can be quite annoying.

So, once you are done editing your work and have no more use of Endnote, you can prevent those references from updating (i.e. you are breaking the link with Endnote) by doing the following in Word:

1. Open your file in Word.
2. Select all the text (CTRL-A)
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+F9