Well, the inability to import sources makes it pretty frustrating for
anything using more than 10-15 sources. I'm a historian, so that means
my students can use it for their papers, but I'm not going to bother to
hand-enter sources, of which I have hundreds. So my undergrads' papers
have fewer sources--and also, I'm not especially concerned if they have
to tweak the data entry to get the right output because Word doesn't
offer a certain field. But tweaking the data entry isn't really
sustainable over an academic career, I don't think.
By technical papers--and I was just using John's term--I was picturing
the articles that people send off to technical journals, all of which
require their own format. EndNote, etc, let you switch formats on the
fly---Word only offers four formats. So it's not going to help people
who need to reformat an article from Journal of Epidemiology to Journal
of Biological Epidemiology reference format. Many people have already
run into the limitations of those formats--the first time I tried to use
it for an edited book, I got errors with Chicago format, and someone
here flagged a problem with the MLA format.
I think it will be quite good for my undergraduate students, and
possibly helpful for some MA theses. But beyond that, any work invested
into entering sources, making it work, etc, would be better invested
into setting up EndNote, Bookends, or Sente, which offer so much more,
and a much greater return on the set-up time.
That's out of the box, of course. I've not checked out your tools (yet),
which seem to make it feasible for large numbers of sources. But
customizing XML themselves is not going to be an option for most people,
and the third-party support (like yours) that MS is counting on to
extend the feature isn't out there yet.
Daiya
