Office 2004 (#10): EndNote substitute; Word formatting; Entourage issues

Today we continue our coverage of reader feedback on Office 2004.

Bookends: EndNote substitute? We previously reported that the current version (7.x) of the EndNote bibliographic software is incompatible with Word 2004; on Monday, we noted that the developers of EndNote have no plans to update version 7.x for Word 2004 compatibility. (However, they do plan on releasing a new version, EndNote 8, at some point that is compatible with Word 2004.) Over the past two days we've received emails from both MacFixIt readers and Sonny Software that the latest version of Sonny Software's Bookends "reference management and bibliography software" is fully compatible with Word 2004 and can import reference data from EndNote. For those users of Word 2004 in need of such software, Bookends may be worth a look.

Word

Formatting problem Reader John McDonnell reports an issue affecting the format of legal documents in Word 2004:

"MS Word 2004 now has an unfixable formatting problem for older documents. This is a large problem for law firms. The traditional look of pleadings has been Courier 12 point, with 6 lines per inch and 15 characters per inch. Many courts had this as the maximum spacing (maximum density). Other entities that have page limits on documents (such as grant applications) have a similar 6/15 rule, so this has become a standard format and many preset forms expect the type to match this.

"About Word 98, the Microsoft Courier font went off. Everything got expanded. A standard 9 inch page has only 48 lines instead of 54, and fewer characters will fit in the 6.5 inch line. Note, the problem exists in the other major font (Times) also. The fix to get back to 6 lines per inch was to go to preferences and select 'use printer metrics' (or just use all the features of Word 6.0/95). This put everything back to the correct format.

"When I upgraded to Word 2004, the problem reappeared. However, this time, checking 'use printer metrics' has no effect. I notified Microsoft tech support, and they have helpfully advised that there is no fix for this problem, and if I want my docs to look like they used to, I should go back to Word X."

Misc. feedback Reader Gabriel Dorado sent a report of a several minor issues with Word 2004:

"Word 2004 quits if a PowerPoint poster is copied and pasted.
"Word 2004 quits frequently when performing a Spelling & Grammar checking, mostly when replace all is chosen.
"Sometimes Word 2004 does not paste text previously copied from other application like Eudora 6.1.1."

We haven't experienced these issues here at MacFixIt; we welcome feedback from readers who may have.

Entourage

Importing issues We've received a number of reports of issues importing date from previous versions of Entourage. Most have involved problems importing mail rules. However, according to a post on the Entourage-Talk mailing list, it appears that Microsoft has discovered a bug when importing news server accounts and newsgroup subscriptions that can result in the loss of subscriptions and/or the corruption of news server accounts during the import process.

Images not downloading automatically Although Entourage 2004 has a preference for automatically downloading image files, reader John Svirsky notes that it doesn't appear to work for him:

"Even though I have changed the preferences to download pictures. Entourage is still not downloading them until I manually tell it to download the pictures."

Drop us an email at Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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