...looks like this:
(translation: Not enough RAM. You cannot undo the operation. Proceed?)
Or like this:
(A COM exception has occurred)
Both windows pop up regularly when I open my PhD thesis (about 210 pages) in Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac on my MacBook (1,83 Ghz, Mac OS X 10.4.10, 1 GB RAM) and try to edit a citation. When I wrote the thesis, I did not use CiteWhileYouWrite, but inserted EndNote in-text citations like this: {Author, Year #Record} (or {, Year #Record} if I wanted to omit the author's name). It was just faster to type. When I finished my document, I clicked on "format bibliography" in my EndNote PlugIn, and Word started working, until the above COM exception occurred. Now dare you, this is a legal and fully registered Version of EndNote (I spent 100 EUR for an upgrade to Mac in January!), so I contacted EndNote support. They were friendly and asked me to send in the document and my library, which I did. Then they formatted my document on a Windows machine for me without any substantial advice on how to avoid the problem in the future. Which is not much use because some citations were arbitrary (I forgot to place the #Record) and of course they didn't get it right. So I did the following thing: I opened a clean and fresh Word document and pasted my thesis chapter-by-chapter into the new document. I avoided two citations which the EndNote support suspected for having caused the error. After every chapter (about 20 pages), I formatted the bibliography. Guess what, already after the 3rd chapter, Word started to slow down extremely, and to re-run page breaks over and over again. After the fifth chapter, both above error messages started to show up again. Citations would remain unformatted untiil I manually clicked into them, this would sometimes help. It took me an ENTIRE DAY to auto-format my bibliography and as a result I have a complete document BUT: Whenever I open the document and try to edit a reference in the text (or add a new one), Word freezes and the above errors appear. Sometimes that happens without me doing anything.
Thus, I have a frozen version of my PhD that I cannot edit. This is a complete nightmare and a catastrophe beyond belief. I now switched to LaTeX (gwTeX / TeXShop / BibDesk) and typeset the entire document again. I should have done that right from the beginning. Not only does it produce a beautiful thesis, but its also a much better workflow. My advice to everyone: Do not write your PhD on a Mac with Word/Endnote. Both pieces of software appear to be badly ported from Windows to the Mac (see
here for Word), and their shortcomings in terms of performance multiply into one big piece of junk. What an annoying waste of time and money. I am frustrated beyond belief. I will NEVER EVER use Word/EndNote again for scientific purposes.
Labels: endnote, microsoft, PhD, software, word
