W07: Citation & bibliography function is useless without editor for the styles!?

T

Tom

Hello everyone,

The new citation & bibliography-function in Word2007 is a neat idea! But
unfortunately it is absolutely worthless for most users, at least in
Germany/ Europe. Many universities over here don't follow any standardizes
citation rule, but have their own rules. Even if the university itself has a
standard, the professors on their own tend to alter these standards to meet
their personal preferences.

With other word: Having a predifined list of 10 styles to choose (as
Word2007 has), is a nice try but not functional at all for folks in Germany/
Europe. Of course there is the theoretical possibility of altering the
XML-XSL-stylesheets to someone's preferences by hand, but this option isn't
realistically usable for a normal end user, since it is a approx. 10,000
lines code long xml-file. The number of people out there who dare (and have
the time and knowledge) to alter these hughe files should be really small,
compared to the masses of end users.

So what would be really necessary is an EDITOR with which every end user
could set up quickly and easyly an own stylesheet for the look and feel of
citations and bibliographies.

There exists an external software for citations and bibliographies called
"EndNote". Someone can see there how they do it: Neat menues in which you
can define the look and feel of every element of your bibliography, no
matter if it concerns citations from books, articles, websites, etc, you
have total control about everything! Something like that needs to be
implemented to the Word2007 feature, if it really wants to be usable.

So:

- Does anybody know such an EDITOR?
- Does anybody want to write such an editor? It would surely hit a market
gap in Europe and a product that may sell good.

Cheers
tom

F'up to microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs
 
D

Daiya Mitchell

Hi Tom,

From what I've read, the citation feature in Word 2007 is not even
trying replace EndNote for academics, but to aid students working on
their first degree. Even law students are complaining it's not good
enough for them. So, MS knows this, and has decided not to go there at
this point. They apparently think that a third-party market will develop
with extensions to the product. See the discussion in the comments here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/joe_friend/archive/2006/07/13/664960.aspx
Although I would hope they have changed their views by this point.

However, if you deal with the MS Office web interface to these groups,
you can post this as a Suggestion, and I at least will vote for it.
Actually, search the Suggestions first, I'm sure it's already there.
Start here:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx

Daiya
 

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