Exporting Endnote information to Excel

Endnote is not manufactured by Microsoft, and whilst it does work with Word and some other WP packages, it is important to remember that you have two different packages produced by two different companies. Endnote is designed to work with WP rather than excel.

Excel expects data in a specified uniform format. No matter how careful you are in Endnote, you will have some variation, if only between reference types, so you may need to import e.g. journal articles and book details separately.
You may need to manipulate some of your author data, as Endnote stores both first and surname in the same field.
Using the methods below, author details will be transferred into excel as Firstname Surname; not ideal for sorting. You may therefore wish to add author details to your library as 'Smith, John' rather than 'John Smith'. This will then transfer into Excel as Surname, Firstname

1. Method 1
2. Method 2

Method 1

In Endnote

1. Select the Tab-Delimited style (To do this click on 'select another style' in your drop down style box) and apply this to your Library
2. Choose File/Export and save the library as a .txt file

In Excel

1. Open the file in excel (File/Open produces better results than the Data Import option)
2. The Text Import Wizard Box will open
3. Choose delimited to sort each field into a separate column**
4. Click on Next
5. Choose the 'tab' option under delimiters (this should be the default)
6. Click on Next
7. You now can choose various options e.g. to not import particular columns, as you should see a small preview of your data in the Wizard box, then click on Finish
8. Asses your spreadsheet as you may need to do some tidying up e.g. adding column headings, adjusting widths etc

**If you have a lot of data variation you may prefer to file all your information into a single column in order to select the appropriate cells and change any criteria if necessary. If this is required then at this point select Fixed Width file and remove all fixed delimiters. You can then use the Data/Text to Columns command to transfer into separate columns.

Method 2

This method is much more straightforward, but unlike method 1 above, does not allow you to disregard any columns as you choose.

In Endnote

1. Select the Tab-Delimited style (To do this click on 'select another style' in your drop down style box) and apply this to your Library
2. Click Edit then copy formatted. N.B. you must choose 'copy formatted' and NOT just 'copy'

In Excel

1. Click on paste
2. Asses your spreadsheet as you may need to do some tidying up e.g. adding column headings, adjusting widths etc