My EndNote/Word Nightmare...
...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.
(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.
posted by bertolt at 14:11
19 Comments:
Sag' Bescheid, wenn du Hilfe/Tips/Infos brauchst. Ich hab' ziemlich viel in den bibtex-configs 'rumgewühlt... TextMate ist übrigens ein guter Texteditor.
Ich benutze die Kombination Mellel / Bookends. Das ist auch kein Traum, aber sehr stabil auch bei langen Texten. An LaTeX habe ich mich irgendwie nie rangetraut. Und jetzt bin ich mit meiner Kombination sehr zufrieden.
The "a COM exception has occurred" error appear to happen because of a clash wtih Word's comments function. I had a similar error that was fixed by deleting all comments. Maybe this is what the "COM" error refs to....?
Perhaps it is far too late to help you with this problem, but I had it recently and figured out what was going on.
COM exception occurs when Word tries to 'repaginate' and runs out of memory from trying to do it too often because certain items in your document move around depending on other text. This is a bigger problem for bigger documents.
What you need to do is remove any text box objects that you have used to label on a picture or other diagram.
You need to label the picture in another program, and then insert a labeled picture as a single item.
If this isn't clear, or you'd like an example email me at pmeintjes@gmail.com
Pete
Same thing with me... the dread error. Thanks for the input, the 'deleting all comments' worked.... were back in action... very very frustrating for awhile, I feel your pain, having competed my PhD in 2002 with an older version of EN that played similar tricks when the pressure was on.
I just had the same problem.
I solved it by looking at another account on the same machine, which worked fine.
So it had to do with that one account where the error occured.
I deleted the Microsoft folder from the Library/Preferences. No solution however.
Then I deleted both the com.microsoft.word.plist and the com.ThompsonEndnote.plist, and boem, it worked again!.
Hope this works for you guys.
I tried all of the above suggestions but nothing worked. By my count Thompson / Endnote owe me for about 20 hours of work time all in. Does anybody have anything good to say about Endnote?
It's 2:00 in the morning...my dissertation is due in 4 days...and I could just throw this computer out the window! I need to have a discussion with whoever writes EN and Word b/c they've got it all wrong. It's awkward, clumsy, and unreliable!
The error I received was "COM Exception: Command not found." (EndNote X2; Word 2008). Closing both apps and deleting the EndNote pref file (com.ThompsonEndnote.plist ) as suggested in the comments was all that was needed.
Thanks for the help.
Thank you so much...deleting that file just saved me hours of work and endnote-loathing.
Removed all comments - seems to be the solution. Deleting the preferences might also help.
same problem - also fixed by deleting all "comments" added by a helpful reviewer - thanks for the advice.
Solved this problem by deleting com.ThomsonResearchSoft.EndNote.plist
Thanks!
Had the same problem. Deleting the comments really worked. Thanks for the solution.
I also had this COM expectation problem. Thanks so much for the suggestion to delete all the comments! Life safer!
deleting all comments worked for me as well - odd, but great!
Anyone who stumbles across this thread in November 2009 or later might like to note that I had the following problem:
Attempting to use EndNote X3 with Word 2008 led to a COM exception notice with "object deleted" returned as the result.
In practice this meant that both CWYW using the EN toolbar, and insertion from within EN failed.
The solution turned out to lie in noticing that the document was in *.doc format -- saving in *.docx format, closing, and re-opening found all working as one would expect.
Of course, I'm now stuck with Word's annoying *.docx format, but c'est la vie.
I have tried looking for file you have been talking (aboutcom.ThompsonEndnote.plist), but nowhere to be found, i am on Mac, word 2008 and using endnote XII.
I've imported my library from XI. I've tried all what has been written on this blog but Nada. I need urgent help, it's driving me crazy. I've my thesis to finish and twi articles to submit and i am stuck with formating my library. help pleaaaaaase.
My message error of course is the same as above : A com exception has occured
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