Workflows in Personal and Professional Productivity

View Original

Papers Delights Me. Again!

Papers continues to surprise and delight me. I’m glad it’s my publication manager of choice.Many years ago, I switched from Endnote to Papers. Back when using Endnote, if I wanted to make a single change to a paper’s citations, I had to unformat and then reformat the whole document.That behavior was so ingrained in me, I started doing the same thing with Papers. I would save a formatted and unformatted version of each manuscript so I could re-use text. Unfortunately, more often than I would like to admit, edits to the formatted copy did not make make it back to the unformatted copy.In my latest writing project, I discovered something great. It’s not necessary to save multiple copies of each project using Papers. Instead, just insert your new Papers Citation(s) in the body of the existing manuscript. When you’re finished writing the new section, select “Format Manuscript.” Papers integrates the new reference(s) (if necessary changing the numbering within the document) and inserts the new citation in the appropriate place in your Bibliography.Once you’ve inserted something new and formatted the document, you can unformat everything (e.g. if you want to copy a single paragraph from your original project to something new).This feature is awesome and was completely unexpected. I guess I should make it a habit to read manuals more often! Happy Weekend!