Writing a thesis is fun. But you want to minimize the risks that might force you to start over. One of which is the choice of tool. I am a fan of MS Word and started writing it there. But apparently I am facing it’s limits…

My thesis currently has around 100 pages, yet a few chapters to come. It is constructed through several different documents that are included into one. All that worked fine so far, but I started noticing some hick-ups. The creation of the complete document and its indexes takes longer and longer. And one time, the structure messed up and I had to rework the master document.

Finishing my thesis with word is surely possible. But I don’t want to risk troubles. I therefore began having a look at Latex. Seems legit. It’s always good to have options.

Now, I have to confess, that I never worked with Latex until recently. Converting my Word-documents into Latex-files took some effort. The main problem for me was the library of my references. I handled the sources of my work in Word. There are probably better solutions, but it’s easy to use and provides everything I need.
Except for an export feature…

No way I would create all the entries manually for my Latex bibliography. Instead I wrote a stylesheet that makes Word create a bibliography in BibTex format (Details regarding the Bibliography Management). Now I can simply copy and paste my library from one system to the other. The only problem is, that the library is full of characters that have to be escaped in Latex. Because I didn’t want to do that manually either, I created a script for that, too.
Here’s how you can export your MS Word sources and references and import them to a BibTex library:

1. Download this stylesheet: Word2Bibtex
2. Save it here: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\Bibliography\Style
3. Start Word and change the style of your bibliography to “Bibtex Export”.
4. Copy the bibliography that word creates for you.
5. Substitute the special characters using this script: The Substitutor
6. Use the result for your BibTex library.
7. Done.

I hope it helps you, as it helped me. Find both also on my stuff-page.