Using paperpile with Microsoft Word

Sorry, it’s a bit technical. I was talking about Microsoft’s new add-in system based on HTML, CSS and Javascript. Paperpile is written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript so the idea that we can simply port our Google Docs plugin to Word using the technology that we already use is very attractive. Also this add-in system works on all operating systems (also Android and iOS and the Web, not just Mac and Word).

It’s definitely possible to create a plugin with older technologies but that would mean big investments upfront and a maintenance burden in the long term (they need to be developed for Mac and Windows separately and use arcane programming languages from the past like Visual Basic).

So our decision to wait for the availability of this new add-in system seemed like the obvious thing to do last year. Now as it is still not available and even on Windows severly limited we regret the decision because it delayed this important feature.

I’m sorry for that. All I can say is that Word support is one of the highest priorities together with mobile Apps for us going forward.

Ok that makes more sense. Sorry. I didn’t catch that the first time through. Thanks for being so patient with me and for responding promptly. I wouldn’t be so insistent if Paperpile wasn’t such a superior product in every other respect.

Hello,

I know the Word integration is a bit of a broken record now however I wanted to share with you some thoughts from the University of York.

We have just started our new academic year and myself and the other librarians are keen for new students and staff to experience the clear benefits of Paperpile, in our view, when compared to other reference management systems, however there is a tremendous unwillingness from students to use Google docs for individual written work.

Although we are a ‘Google institution’, Office 365 is now free to all our students, and is still extremely popular so getting them to use Paperpile is pretty much impossible!

Any update on your alpha plugin much appreciated.

Thanks,
Martin

That makes sense Martin. We are aware that thousands of people are waiting for Word support and it’s been priority for the past year.

There will be a blog post tomorrow where we ask for sign ups for the private beta. And we hope to get an early version to the first beta users by the end of the month.

We hope to be able to make a very streamlined beta phase getting this in shape for public use as soon as possible. The goal is that next semester every student has the choice between Google Docs and Word independent of whether they want to use Paperpile or not.

I still think using Google Docs makes a lot of sense though, especially for students…

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We are very close now and we’ve started taking sign-ups for the private beta. Please check out this blog post with details how to sign up:

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Any update?

Like Susan_Rubin and many others, I would love an update on both the Word support and the iOS app.

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We’ll let you know if there are news. iOS should be next and Word after that.

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Really looking forward to use this masterpiece in word

Same here. Looking forward to it.

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Any chance that there is going to be a LibreOffice extension for Paperpile?

LibreOffice is not planned at the moment.

Eagerly waiting for this. Tired of using Mendeley.

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Any news, guys?

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Any news on this? I see posts about a private beta from October of 2016, but then more posts from lots of people saying that they signed up for it and then never heard anything, even months later. I would expect that if a private beta was coming “soon” back in October of 2016, then there should be some progress on this a year later, even if only to say that the beta has been released and is ongoing (and maybe some ways to get it).

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I’m afraid at this point I can only confirm that we are way behind schedule on this…

We released the sign-up form early on purpose so we can collect feedback from interested users. In the long term that will prove to be helpful for the product. In the short-term however, it clearly was misleading in terms of expectations on the timeframe. I’m sorry for that.

Stefan can you confirm the app is still in development? I promise I am not trolling but been a subscriber for a couple of years but it’s seems to have slowed down somewhat

Wow, that comes as a surprise and it’s somewhat ironic as we have doubled our staff this year and moving faster than ever.

We’ve invested a lot of money and resources to port Paperpile to iOS, Android, and Desktop (Word) and prepare our server infrastructure to make all the features possible you are waiting for. This takes time and we have come very close.

I can see how our users who are not familiar with how much work is being done every day here on new stuff, can get the impression that we’ve slowed down.

Not sure what to do about it. These are huge releases and can’t really be done I small chunks just to demonstrate progress. Once we’ve rolled out these new products and fixed some technical debt that holds us back in the main app we hope to get back to constant user visible feature releases.

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Thanks for the response Stefan . It was probably more a fear on my part…Used the majority of all other reference tools and this is the only one that has clicked… thank you

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Please, please, please let this come to fruition.