A propos of our earlier discussion of bibliographic software:
I've been told that MS Word 2007 has a "reference" function that operates like EndNote, et al.: one creates a reference library, and Word can handle the references in a variety of styles (chicago, APA, MLA, Turabian, etc.).
Has anyone used this function? Verdicts? I'm due for a computer update....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
It is a massive piece of shit. Personally, I'd rather shoot myself in the head than use it.
Its okay. The formats available leave a lot to be desired. But you can convert them all to text and edit the individual citations to look how you want when you are ready to make a PDF or send off a copy.
Use BibTeX!
I'm fundamentally against using any proprietary format to save my work in. Microsoft shouldn't own any part of my work. (Which isn't to say you can't use their software to create things, but don't save it in their formats...)
These days there are tools that can be use BibTeX to export HTML, etc,. or other formats which can be integrated easily enough with any wordprocessor, even if you don't want to use LaTeX. (Though why not use LaTeX?)
It is a massive piece of shit.
In other news, Pingping has a posse.
I hate Word 2007 so much, that although I got Office 2007 for free I installed an earlier versions of office (2000 and 2003, on two computers) to avoid the newer, uglier, less intuitive, cumbersome god-awful interface. My advice is simply to avoid it altogether; my office computer has it and I hate it (was unaware of the reference function though, so my response is just general word 2007 disgust).
I've played with that function a bit, and it's a typical Microsoft product: bloated, counter-intuitive, and unreliable. I still just do my citations manually (except when I'm doing linguistics stuff, in which case I use LyX, which does the LaTeX grunt work for me).
Yeah, seriously. Firefox, OpenOffice, Zotero and if you need to write in Greek or Arabic fonts try Thessalonica.
Unless you have a mac then I hear that Scrivener rocks.
Source:
http://www2.smumn.edu/deptpages/tcwritingcenter/content/writing/apa/WORD2007forAPA.pdf
on P. 3 of the pdf document:
"APA References and Word 2007
The 4th tab on the Word 2007 Ribbon Bar is References. If you click on it, you will see a listing for APA style. Alas, the style is not correct. Word 2007 does not (1) format titles, volumes, or issues correctly, (2) does not space lines correctly, and (3) does not create hanging indents. Aside from that , you may find Word's References useful. Just be sure to make the corrections after you use it. Throughout this booklet you will find other ways Word 2007 can make APA formatting much easier."
In other words, looks like it actually sucks. Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood computer tech /non-professional (note: not unprofessional) philosopher.
The only thing I could not figure out from the document was whether APA really means OUR APA. LOL ... but you academikalischerns know. Right?
hey ... the type-in word to send this comment is jugabu. arabic root of juggalo i guess. :)~~
Sometimes, the alien quickly kicked the electronic pile of biscuits. Jeremy Cushing
Post a Comment