Comments on: Stupid, stupid upgrade creatures

By: tmlbk

tmlbk — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:34:44 +0000

Let me put in a good word for a LaTex solution consisting of MikTex, Lyx and BibTex.

By: Dr Paisley

Dr Paisley — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:20:05 +0000

I just upgraded to MS-Office 2008 for mac. God help me. It’s such a common problem. Now how am I going to solve it?

Fixed.

By: Michael H Schneider

Michael H Schneider — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:40:05 +0000

Shouldn’t that be caret, rather than karat?

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 01:02:40 +0000

I like Bookends as a biblio package. But as a general matter I tend to like obscure alternatives to market-dominant programs. For WP, I like NisusWriter.

By: Clark

Clark — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:55:04 +0000

EndNote will do worse than not play well. It won’t play at all. The head guy from MBU was at Ars answering questions and whoa there was a lot of hate.

On the other hand you can do macros in Python easily now which is arguably much better than VBA anyway. But if you’re trying to maintain macros it’s a pain.

I keep hoping the new version of iWork comes out soon. Numbers has a lot of promise but isn’t there yet. (It doesn’t even support scripting yet) Pages 2.0 is arguably better than Word for most things now though. I rarely open up Word although I upgraded to 2008 just to use Excel and Applescript. Although inexplicably Applescript in Excel 2004 allowed either Unix or old Sys9 styled path separators whereas Excel 2008 won’t accept Unix paths at all. You have to use colons (:) for all path separators!

By: John Holbo

John Holbo — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:52:11 +0000

Actually, what IS the best bibliography tool. I feel fairly locked into EndNote since I’ve been creating a library over a period of years. But maybe there is something better out there. I have started using Zotero to take notes while surfing. But I haven’t tried to generate MS-Word exportable stuff by means of it. (Is that actually possible?)

By: ben wolfson

ben wolfson — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 05:40:37 +0000

Still using Endnote? Zotero, dammit, Zotero!

ebib?

By: terence

terence — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:59:00 +0000

The one good thing about Word 2008 for a PC is that, under referencing, it has its own equivalent of Endnote. It’s not quite as good but seems, from first inspection, to work okish.

Everything else is evil though.

By: andrew

andrew — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:18:59 +0000

The internet archive's solution to the line break problem is pretty much the same as yours.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:27:40 +0000

Still using Endnote? Zotero, dammit, Zotero! (Though the Word plugin probably won’t work for you now…)

http://www.zotero.org/

By: SamChevre

SamChevre — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:15:12 +0000

For the fairly simple fix I use, copy into TextPad (trial version is free), and save—then open with Word. TextPad lets you choose encoding type.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:14:54 +0000

As this very blog wisely counseled, don't upgrade.

By: Zippy the Comment Frog

Zippy the Comment Frog — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:14:16 +0000

I normally search and replace for a space followed by a paragraph break, which avoids removing the second one in a double line break. That does not necessarily save a step, however, because then I run a search and replace for two spaces in a row—sometimes there are none, but often there are at least a few.

By: John Rynne

John Rynne — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:46:08 +0000

Yes, MS-Office 2008 for mac is a piece of crap. Fortunately I kept the previous version on hand. Ms Word I have renamed “Kenny”, because it dies in every episode (cf. South Park).

By: Timon

Timon — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:31:06 +0000

for rn read \r\n, they were interpreted by the comment parser as escapes