General Preferences in Microsoft Word
General preferences are useful when you always use your EndNote library along with your word processor and you always use your word processor along with your EndNote library.
To access General preferences, select Preferences on the EndNote 2025 tab in Word.
- Open EndNote When Starting Word: Select this item to always open EndNote when you start Microsoft Word.
- Close EndNote When Leaving Word: Select this item to always close EndNote when you leave Microsoft Word. This works only when the EndNote program was launched with one of the Cite While You Write commands from within Word or if the Open EndNote When Starting Word preference is selected.
- Return to Document After Inserting Citations: Select this item to always make your document the active window after inserting citations with EndNote’s Insert Selected Citation(s) command. If this preference is turned off so that the Word document remains in the background, you will not see the inserted citation in the Word document until the document becomes the active window. This is because the display for the Word document is not updated in the background.
- Enable Instant Formatting on new Word documents: This option is available for Cite While You Write. It turns Instant Formatting on or off for new Word documents. When you enable Instant Formatting, you can also determine how often EndNote scans for temporary citations and whether it checks for citation changes.
- To turn instant formatting on or off in an existing Word document, see Instant Formatting in Word.
- Turn off Word’s "Show field codes instead of their values option" when opening or updating documents that include citations: EndNote uses extensive Word field codes in order to identify and format citations. When field codes are displayed, your document can look confusing! See Field Codes in Microsoft Word for more information and an example.
We recommend that you not view field codes in Word. This option ensures that you will see appropriate text in your document.