Paperpile is fantastic. Google Docs, however, is not. It is a seriously under-powered word processing application for writing long and complex scientific manuscripts.
Most scientists have a copy of MS Office, which comes with a Onedrive 1TB account. I would prefer Paperpile to store papers in the Onedrive account too.
Is any of the following ever going to happen ?
Offline plugin for MS Word (This is possible if Paperpile uses a standalone Chrome like Electron.js)
I am glad to say that we have good news concerning this topic. We are currently working on MS Word integration and hope to start beta testing in a month. And, yes, Electron.js is exactly what we are using!
It’s the first time we get a feature request for Onedrive integration. I have put it onto our stack of feature requests and we will watch if this request becomes more popular.
The offline word plugin is indeed good news. I will be looking forward to removing all the other reference managers I have installed and move to Paperpile full-fledged.
I would like to add that I think you should also consider creating a plugin for LibreOffice. Like Nachiket, I just can’t into Google Docs when it’s still missing features compared to MS Word or LibreOffice.
I’m looking forward to trying out the MS Word plugin.
I too am desperate to get my fingers on the MS word beta test. I keep promoting paperpile to my PhD and Post Doc researcher colleagues and they all love the look, function, ease of use, and the way it supports rapid reference collection… but the stumbling block is always always that it doesn’t integrate with MS word…
I’m writting my thesis in google docs purely for the benefit of using paperpile… then copying all the text out to MS word to add in titles, figures, tables, formatting etc… Its a clunky and cumbersome workflow at the moment so roll on the MS word integration and I can dump google docs for everything but collaborative writing.
We will announce the beta here. We hope to start testing very soon. Please be aware that the first versions will be beta quality and mainly useful to help us find problems. But with enough beta testers we are optimistic that we can get to production quality soon.
Hi, Stefan. This is great news. I would like to participate in the beta testing as well.
I am a PhD student currently looking for alternatives to the other reference managers. PaperPile is by far the best one I have ever worked with, but the main problem concerning my thesis writing has to do with the poor formatting features in Google Docs. As most people in academia, I am stuck with MS Word. So I am looking forward to trying out the plugin. Thanks.
I believe I’m in the same situation as most else. I will have to start writing my dissertation in the coming months and having this plugin available will drastically improve upon the experience.
Not only that, I can finally convert some non-believers!
This may need be a post after release, but are there any plans to allow for compatibility with other in text citation editing in the beta release? As in, if I am editing a .doc with citations planted from Mendeley or EndNote, will I be able to edit/add to them? Thanks!
While we have plans to migrate docs from other reference managers, it won’t be part of the first betas. We need to focus to get our own citations right first
Please note that the latest MS Office update on Mac makes it 64-bit and thus all older plugins now don’t work anymore. Most reference managers like Mendeley, Papers are scrambling but have no solution. Only Endnote, I have to admit it is hard to believe, has an update which now works with MS Word on the Mac. Paperpile can sweep the floor here if they bring out the beta and then the full version soon.
We are making good progress and have a version that we are already internally testing on Mac. There is still some work on the UI, but the core functionality is already in place. We hope to roll out beta tests for Mac by the end of September.
Thank you for the update @andreas . I am only a little disappointed that Paperpile is focusing on Macs when the larger userbase should be MS Office on Windows. Anyhow, I volunteer for testing, even if the app is unfinished, as I have since Paperpile was first announced for testing on Reddit years ago.
Sure the user base on MS Windows is much bigger, but given our current technical infrastructure deploying for Macs first is the most painless way to get early feedback.
Like many others, I acknowledge Word is clunky and frustrating as hell, preferring to write text in Ulysses.
However, final copy is done in Word. You can write an undergrad thesis in Google Docs, but not a PhD thesis.
Then there’s the issue of supervisors, collegues, journal editors etc who are all pretty much using Word.
Also +1 for OneDrive integration. This seems like a no brainer to me. Universities that are giving students and staff Office 365, and most of them are in the UK, are also giving a large OneDrive space. Private subscribers to Word are also getting 1 TB of Onedrive space. Therefore, if someone is going to use Paperpile for Word then there is little need for them to have Google storage.
It’s more first half of October because we first want to get the mobile beta apps out. We will have a blog post about the beta tests for this fall soon with more details.
Would you happen to have any update on the word plug in? I love a lot of the features that Paperpile has (I am in my free trial period), but would have to have word integration for it to be truly feasible for my thesis. My supervisors insist on word.
