When Office 2007 was announced, there was a feature I was really excited about: References. A whole tab on the ribbon is dedicated to them, allowing you to choose your style and insert and manage citations. I was very happy at this news, because one of the things we try to get students to do in our program is make MLA references–but we have all kinds of problems. Chiefly, the students are not used to making citations (they don’t learn it here like we do in the U.S.), and MLA citations can be very difficult and complex, depending on the source. I imagined that MS Word 2007 would have an editor that would allow you to choose your citation type (e.g., book, periodical, etc.) from an exhaustive list taken directly from the MLA listing, and then prompt you for all the relevant data, and then automatically insert your in-text citations and the Works Cited list, all formatted to MLA standards.

Boy, was I ever disappointed.

First, the list of MLA citations in in MS Word’s dialog box comes up in one of those incurably idiotic miniature scroll windows that show only six lines at a time, and should have been done away with 10 years ago. Second, the list of citations is incomplete; for example, our students rely heavily on electronic sources, particularly from library database subscriptions. Word’s MLA list does not allow for these. Third, the citations are not inserted intuitively; since one is citing a stretch of text, you would expect that you would select the cited text and insert–but that just deletes the text you selected and replaces it with the citation. Fourth, the Works Cited list is not automatically added at the end–you have to insert it, and even though it is required to start on a new page at the end of the document, Word will not create that area, instead putting it wherever your cursor is set. Fifth, the Works Cited list is not formatted right–the title should be centered, the list double spaced, everything 12 point text–it’s not. Worse, Word does stuff like make certain text styled, like bold and blue, where it should not be. Dates are not expressed correctly, web page article titles not included, etc. etc. Sixth, the whole thing is done in a field, which makes it extremely difficult to edit and keep straight when you must make the necessary modifications that Word did wrong. Seventh… well, the list goes on, and on. You get the idea.

In short, it’s a failure, a mess, a complete disaster which only makes adding correct citations harder to do, not easier. Disappointed, I had to steer my students away from it.

But there was hope: maybe Microsoft would improve it with the next version of Office. Certainly I could not be the only one to notice how awful it was, and Microsoft would get off their butts and make the next iteration much better.

Nope.

I found that my college’s Citrix account had upgraded to Office 2010, so I went in and checked it out. Not only has it not improved even the tiniest bit, it didn’t even upgrade to the 7th edition of MLA, which made major changes in how citations are written. True, the 7th edition came out only about a year and a half ago, but certainly they could have done something. But nope–not only does Word’s Reference feature still suck, it now sucks and is out of date.