The icon's funny. This isn't.

[jadesfire]

Apologies to all waiting for words, but. The thesis is broken. And when I say broken, I mean Endnote/Word broke my husband's thesis and we can't work out how to fix it. At all.

There are no words at this point. Those of you who pray, it'd be appreciated.

Edited to clarify - we still have the thesis, with its 394 references. Which would be great, if we didn't happen to know that there are 391 references in it. And some of those are broken.

I always suspected Endnote was evil. Now I have proof.

Comments

[thalia]

Oh, no. I really hope he's able to recover it somehow.

[white_hart]

Oh, how awful. I really hope that it can be recovered.

[nightdog-barks.livejournal.com]

Oh, Jades.

*hugs and hopes*

[rustydog.livejournal.com]

Oh, for the love of... that is the kind of thing I used to (and sometimes still) have nightmares about. Much love to you both and I'm thinking software miracles in your direction.

[aeshna_uk]

Eeek! Computers know, they just know - I seem to recall something similar with my thesis. Deep breaths and good luck!

[silja-b.livejournal.com]

Hi,

You don't really know me (although we do have a few mutual friends) and I'm not even sure why I drifted this way tonight, but...I was once in the same sort of Evil!Endnote/word/thesis total cockup. Is the bibliography annotated by number or name? There are a few tricks that could help restore at least some of the data fields in the right order.

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Hi there and most welcome!

By number. There are 391 articles/books which are referenced about 750 times. The problem seems to be that instead of reinserting the number, it's duplicating the reference and we can't make it stop!

At the moment, we're at the 'scrap EndNote and type it all by hand' stage, so any suggestions would be incredibly welcome.

Thank you so much for offering - we're pretty much at the end of our tethers here.

[silja-b.livejournal.com]

Hm, that sounds depressingly familiar. It used to be a fairly common problem, particularly in earlier versions. There is the old true and tried (and even occasionally effective) method of copying the whole thing to a new Word document, marking a random reference and clicking 'format bibliography' in the Word Endnote toolbar...and then crossing one's fingers.

ETA: I'm assuming you've set it to insert the biblio at the end of the document. Try copying both with and without the biblio. It sometimes helps to force it to redo the whole thing from the field codes but it can also crash it completely.

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Tentative signs are hopeful - it's got the reference list down to 280, which is much, much closer to what it should be. To quote the other half "it's not right, but it's not as wrong as it was"

Thank you so so much. It's still going to be a long night, but there's a glimmer of hope now. I'm trying to work out how to send you flowers over the internet :) Thanks!

[silja-b.livejournal.com]

You're both most welcome :)

And now I'll wander back over to TARDIS Big!Bang for a bit of entertainment.

[dune-drd.livejournal.com]

EEEEEEK! It's everyone's worst nightmare

Crossing all my fingers that you can work it out!

[blackmare-9.livejournal.com]

Oh, honey.

*says a prayer for thesis miracles*

[miss-zedem.livejournal.com]

*hugs and crosses fingers*

[fish-echo.livejournal.com]

*crosses fingers* *thinks good thoughts*

[mad-jaks.livejournal.com]

Even though LJ wouldn't let me tell you this last night I was crossing everything for you. I do hope things are looking better for all of you (thesis included) this morning.