Creating a Reference List Using Excel

fattestman

I'm doing a research proposal at the moment with a fairly large reference list, which I want to compile as I go along so it's not all on top of me when I get to the end.

In order to make my life easier and keep my references uniform I was hoping to create a formula in Excel that would throw out the reference for me without me having to worry about checking the format (as I do when creating each reference manually in Word).

For example:

This is one of the references.

Brackenreg, J. (2004) Issues in reflection and debriefing: How nurse educators structure experiential activities. Nurse Education in Practice 4, p. 264-270.

Where...
Brackenreg is the author's surname
J is the author's initial
2004 is the year
Issues in reflection and debriefing: How nurse educators structure experiential activities is the article title
Nurse Education in Practice is the journal title
4 is the volume
264-270 are the page numbers

What I want to do is set up eight cells in Excel entitled 'author's surname', 'author's initial', 'year', 'journal', 'volume' and 'page'. Then, each time I use a source I can quickly enter the relevant information beside the corresponding label and a formula at the bottom would churn out the reference, which I could then copy and paste back into Word confident that it's the exact format as all the others (with all the little dots and underlining ans so-forth in the right place).

I've used formulae in Excel before and am usually fairly good with them but I've only ever used them to work with numbers, not text.

Anyway, thanks for taking the to read this (anyone who bothers).