Saturday, September 12, 2009

Complaint

Why, pray tell, does the latest version of MS Word have separate buttons labelled "Insert Footnote" and "Insert Citation"? Since I (and I suspect, most college professors) use the terms somewhat interchangeably, this is confusing. And I frankly don't understand what the program is doing when it "inserts citation"--it's not actually putting in a footnote. 

I've been fielding a lot of student questions about citation lately.

5 comments:

Notorious Ph.D. said...

Huh. I've got the new version, but for Mac, and all I have is the old-fashioned "footnote" one. Odd.

dance said...

Footnote creates the number and lets you type a note--Insert Citation refers to a built-in EndNote-lite feature in Mac Office 2008--after you have inserted a footnote, it will generate the citation for you.

dance said...

Whoops, PS. WinWord 2007 and MacWord 2008 both have an EN-lite feature---but only MacWord supports using Insert Citation in footnotes (unless an update changed that). I think you are using Windows, where those things are probably next to each other?

I have been debating whether WinWord 2007's failure to support citations in footnotes means I should stop requiring them, as I do believe students should take advantage of the technology they have.

clio's disciple said...

Dance: Thanks! That clears things up considerably.

Anonymous said...

You know what I miss? Auto Format, which I only ever used to change straight quotes to smart quotes so that things were unified.