When you add all the chapters to form 'the thesis' i.e. 200-300 document. How do you stop word going absolultely crazy? are there any ways of shutting down parts of it so it doesn't have trouble updating mendeley etc.

I haven't experienced this for my thesis....yet...but did with hubby's and wondering if there any computer tricks (e.g. shut everything else down?) to make it work better?

Hi Sneaks,

I don't have experience with Mendeley but did similar with EndNote actually (300+ pages). I had multiple chapter documents which I had to join. I ended up with such a huge mess that I had to do it twice. The second time, I did it in very small chunks, ensuring whatever was pasted was actually there properly. It was so painful that I had to control myself from switching to Latex (after doing everything i.e. my final submission). I am not sure if Mendeley allows it, there was a way in EndNote which made the citations unformatted and I turned off instant formatting.

Hope this helps in some way

yeah, mendeley does allow that, but I need to leave the citations formatted for now because of the et al thing. Also my sup still has to read through it AGAIN and will probably make more changes, so don't want to unformat mendeley just yet. However, I do need it in one document now (at the moment working on individual chapters), because sup wants page numbers etc all together and sent as one document.

I'm working with word and endnote, and the only way that I could get it to work was to cut and past all chapters in one at a time, update endnote and then save, then do the next one. Before I did this, I had all of the chapter headings in, so that I could make sure that everything was in the right order and endnote wouldn't have a melt down if i needed to move massive chunks of text around. It is a bit slow working on it when trying to update the references, but its not unworkable. I have also done my toc now, so that might be slowing it down a bit?

well I had a google and it seems what slows it down is sometimes 'repagination' that goes on in the background. You can take this option off, to speed it up, but you can only do that in draft view (by going to options > advanced> general and unticking the repagination option). I think I'll use this if it gets awful, but I prefer working on print view.

I did it the way FM mentions, one chapter at a time, update endnote, save, then add the next chapter.

I expected drama and it all just worked fine and didn't take very long either. I didn't add page numbers til it was all in one document, and only formatted my headings in the final document to make a table of contents. I added a section break after each chapter so they didn't move around, and checked the formatting of everything I'd cut and pasted as some of the tables got their formatting messed up.

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Hi Sneaks,

You can also up-load the single word documents/ chapters in a single/big PDF file using Adobe Acrobat or similar. I used Expert PDF 7. My computer wouldn't have coped with the cut & paste process. Also, my uni asked for a hard bound copy and an electronic copy in a single non -editable PDF document. so, this was the easiest way to do it.

Also, the more you work on a big file, the higher the risk to corrupt it. I don't know how long is your thesis, but mine was very close to the word limit of 100,000.