Hi, I have decided to pursue the path of using LaTex (the document preparation system) instead of MS Word, hopefully the steep learning curve will pay off...

I use Refworks to create the bibliography which is then exported to bibtex:refworks ID. And this is where the problem lies...Refwork has a multitude of options depending on whether it is a web-page, journal or report. However, when this exports to bibtex, unless it is a Journal or report Latex does not recognise the other field and assigns them as misc. and thus does not include data such as URL, date accessed etc.

So, in summary, what do I do to ensure that Refworks exports all the data in the correct format OR how do I ensure that Latex includes all the correct information as entered into Refworks. And the resultant Bibliography is correctly populated.

Also, any thoughts on the use of Latex over MS Work are much appreciated-Is Latex really worth the frustration it sometimes creates?

Any help is much appreciated!

Milo

Dear Milo,

Though I cannot directly advice you on Latex and Refworks but I had similar experience with Latex and Endnote. What I did was to unformat my references in MS Word first. Then I had to play around with regular expressions (using e.g. Notepad++) to search and replace both the citations as well as to ensure the new bibtex files were properly formatted. In short, I guess there is no easy solution (at least not for endnote). You need to manually ensure that the citations are in the right format and exports everything. Later on, I used jabref to edit/correct the bibtex file.

Hope this helps

Thanks Mak_2011.

I'll have a look at this and see how it goes, how have you found using Latex? are you new to this approach or are you relatively familiar with it? I am still in 2 minds as to whether to keep going or return to Word. Anyone else have thoughts/experience of MS Word versus Latex?

milo

I used Latex for my upgrade report earlier this year and found it much better than Word. I had issues with Word during my MSc dissertation and was glad to find an alternative. It does take a bit of perseverence to get the hang of it but the finished document just looks so much nicer. When it comes to referencing I use Mendeley and it is set to export everything to a Bibtex file which seems to put everything in the correct document class automatically and Latex seems to recognise everything as it should be. Mendeley also works with Word so I have a choice. I've never used refworks, maybe you need to tweak the settings for how it exports the info to Bibtex?

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Hey Milo,

Personally I would recommend that if you can switch to Latex asap, do it. I used latex previously off and on but my sup likes MS Word. So, he kind of forced me into Word. Now, it was actually too late for me when I realized what a huge mistake I had made! In my case my MS Word and Endnote had close to 300+ references and I was done with my first draft by the time I realized that I should have never used MS Word! To summarize, it was extremely painful to deal with tables, figures running out, contents not properly generated and it was terrible when in spite of all efforts, my examiners spotted ridiculous errors of missing references (of figures) due to MS Word's problems with handling long documents and how things get updated (and most times not updated!!) :-s
So, if you can move away from MS Word to Latex or even Lyx (which is sort of a nice compromise between Word and Latex), then please go ahead. You may have to learn it for two weeks or even a month, at first, but it will save you a lot of time and possibly embarrassment (as it happened in my case) later!

Hope this helps

I began learning Latex at the start of my PhD. Have used it to write up my thesis, I think it is well worth the frustration.

I tried to use latex before but I found inserting tables quite cumbersome - does anyone know if there is a shortcut that I would be able to insert excel tables into latex and would anyone have any good links to a PhD formatted latex thesis? On a funny latex note when I did email my friend who introduced me to latex and put in the subject line "I love latex!!!!!" she automatically thought it was spam :p

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@Emmie, if you saved an excel table as an image file e.g. jpeg then I would have thought you would be able to insert it as an image instead. I haven't actually tried this yet though, it's just a guess!

@emma

There is some really good advice at on this forum. http://www.latex-community.org/ with lots of problems and solutions, it also has a search function so I am sure you will be able to get to where you need. As for images, I think you need to save them as png to replace jpg etc.

You can read about it here. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Importing_Graphics

Good luck,

Hi Emmie,

Have you tried Excel2Latex macro? I believe you can get it from here: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/excel2latex/

Hope this helps