Sunday, May 04, 2008

Making EndNote X1 work again, sort of...

While trying to format the bibliography of my thesis recently, EndNote managed to hang and crash Word 2007. When I restarted Word, the EndNote tab was nowhere to be seen. The EndNote Cite While You Write Add-in had been disabled by Word due to its malfunction. Re-enabling the CWYW Add-in takes just a few steps. This only applies to Word 2007 for Windows, not earlier versions.

Start by clicking on the "Office" button in the top left corner of the Word2007 window (The fact that Microsoft elected to make that thing act as a button, with no label of any sort, is a topic for another rant). Under the Office button menu, click on "Word Options" at the bottom of the menu. That opens up the Word Options window. Click on "Add-ins" to get the following window:


At the bottom of the list of Add-Ins, under "Disabled Application Add-Ins", you can see the Cite While You Write add-in. To re-enable this, go to the Manage: menu just below. Change the menu from "COM Add-ins" to "Disabled Items"



Click Go, and you'll get a new little window like below:

Click on the "Add-in: cite while you write (endnote cwyw.dll)" and then hit Enable.

After doing that, shut down Word 2007 and restart. The EndNote tab should re-appear and work like normal.

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One other note. EndNoteX1 (or the patched X1.0.1) simply does not work with Word 2007 if you're running a 64-bit Vista install. This issue is buried deep in the EndNote help pages somewhere and isn't really described well. The simple answer is that you cannot format a bibliography in Word 2007 with EndNote X1 on 64-bit Vista. EndNote will hang, Word will crash, and you won't get your bibliography. EndNote seems to work inside Word 2007 on any other operating system version (XP, Vista x32 etc), just not x64 Vista. In essence, there's no reason to even enable the Cite While You Write functionality if you're running the X1,Word2007,Vista x64 combination. You can probably get away with saving your Word 2007 document with temporary citations as a .rtf Rich Text File, and then generate the bibliography from inside EndNote (under the Tools>Format Paper>Format Paper menu item).

Thomson Scientific says that EndNote will have full functionality with Word 2007 on 64-bit operating systems when they release EndNote X2 in six weeks. It remains to be seen how much Thomson will be charging me to upgrade my non-functional X1 install to X2.