Customer Reviews

ENDNOTE V7 WME/W2K/XP

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

(WinXP user using MS OfficeXP):
Endnote has saved me countless hours of entering and arranging bibliographic entries, making this part of term paper, thesis, and even publication writing almost trivial. Not only can you instantly search and cite publications while writing, specifying almost any possible citation and reference style, but you can also download all your reference information, including abstracts over the internet. I may spend a half an hour total collecting, citing, and putting in professional bibliographic format, say, 20 citations for a term paper. The other students who don't use this program may waste half a day doing this. If you are a graduate student (or academic professional), this program is worth its weight in gold. And even though the small journal I am submitting to is not in Endnote's thousands of predefined output styles, I was able to easily customize my own output style for this journal.

That being said, I have one major caveat about version 7: I upgraded to 7.0 from version 5 because I thought it would offer me a similar revolution for organizing figures and tables that it did for bibliographies--something I have to toil over in my thesis. The aspects that make EndNote great for references, however, are not developed for figres and tables. (1)Endnote offers almost endless citation and output styles for references;(2) edit your citations in Endnote, and when you update your references in your paper, it edits itself. None of these happen with figures.
(1)You cannot specify styles for figues--the only choice you have is caption on top or bottom, and figures at end of paragraph or end of paper. Does your journal require you to refer to figure abbreviated as Fig.? then you're out of luck. What if your journal wants a list of figure captions separate from the figures, with no captions on the figure? You are also out of luck.
(2)What if you need to edit your figure after using it in the paper? Should be easy, right, just edit it in endnote and refresh the figures on you paper, just like with references? No. You have to find every reference to that figure in your paper, delete it, and then then refer to the new edited figure. Maybe not a problem for a small paper, but for a thesis, where there are references to a figure thoughout the paper, this is a royal pain in the behind.
I have talked to tech support at Endnote (very nice and helpful people, by the way), and they have confirmed that there is no way around these problems. They refunded me for my upgrade to Endnote 7, since my already purchased version 5 did what I needed.
The thing is, MS Word has its own simplified reference manager for figures using field codes (look it up in help). Endnote 7 just uses uses this already built-in function of Word, without adding any benefits. In fact, at least in Word, you can edit your figures, and if you get really creative with field codes, you can circumvent some of the style problems I mentioned above.

So, by all means, get EndNote to manage your references. Don't use it yet for your figures and tables, until a later version when EndNote has made it more flexible and user friendly. Instead, learn how to use field codes in Word, and email EndNote's suggestions box to make these necessary changes. The people working there are nice and capable of making these changes.

HOW USED: Typical deliverables for my small science consulting company are reports to clients and State and Federal regulators. These reports typically cite a wide variety of information sources, including personal telephone communications, data records, journal articles, government guidance documents, letters, and memorandum. As a consequence, any software program that allows management and insertion of citations into MS WORD 2003 reports (XP Pro) in our format shaves time off report preparation and lowers costs to our clients.

REVIEW: After several hours developing customized input and output formats, I can report that EndNote does a fabulous job. It workied seamlessly with MS WORD 2003 to insert citations and a bibliography into several reports. Reference selection for insertion is simple and intuitive using the EndNote tool bar in MS WORD.

TESTING: I evaluated EndNote before purchased the software. I went to the EndNote web site [http://www.endnote.com/] and downloaded the FREE DEMO version of EndNote. I spent a few hours over the course of a week playing with the program. Although not intuitively obvious in operation, I found the EndNote Demo simpler to operate and, after formating input and outputs, a pleasure to use in comparison to like-featured products of competitors. The EndNote Demo is not supposed to be any different than the real thing - except that you only get to use it for a 30 day trial period. Even so, when problems arose, I E-mailed tech support on two separate occasions while working with the Demo for advice on how to handle my business formating needs. To their credit, I got fast and very useful answers to my questions (kudos). In contrast, I had previously spent several fruitless days toying with one of EndNotes competitor programs (Biblioscape [http://www.biblioscape.com/biblioscape.htm]),which you can also download for a free test drive. I had many more problems running the Biblioscape program. It crashed 8 times in one hour. I never was able to format either input or output before running out of uses (the Biblioscape test drive allows you to use the program 30 times before it requires purchase or exit). Because the program crashed so often, that I never was able to really get into the meat of this less-expensive program, which others seemed to rate highly. All is well though, EndNote works very well indeed.

I just wanted to put here a warning that the new version of Endnote (8.0) is out (7/04) and it is very buggy, - so if you are going to buy it, get version 7.0 if at all possible!

There are big *UNRESOLVED* compatibility issues with Word 2003. The "Cite While You Write" feature doesn't work, which is a big deal. Don't be fooled by the endnote.com Web site--their seemingly easy fix doesn't work.

Don't believe me? Do a quick Internet search on Endnote 7 and Word 2003 compatibility. Many have had problems.

Their older versions worked perfect. But their new versions are so buggy since Endnote 6.0, e.g. memory leaks, word slowdown and freeze. Now, when I try 7.0, it always pops up an error saying "Endnote is waiting for user information, please go back to Endnote program"? There is no information on their tech support page as well. I really doubt what those guys are doing for such an expensive software.

I recently bought version 7 of Endnote for Mac OS X, and after downloading all the suggested updates for both Endnote and MS Word it crashed seriously many times. Although the software looks like a great tool, it is not ready for the Mac yet. Hopefully future versions will work, instead of crashing hard.