Why is using Zotero on my google doc sooooo slow? Can anyone help?

ilishio
Hello,

I'm trying to use Zotero with google docs but it's incredibly slow and only sometimes works, I have to keep closing and restarting the app and trying again. Can anyone help?
  • dstillman
    If this a large document, you should disable "Automatically update citations" in the Document Preferences window to speed it up. If it's regularly hanging — beyond just being slow — you should try disabling any third-party browser extensions, reloading Google Docs, and trying again.

    Beyond that, how large is the document and roughly how many citations do you have? The current Google Docs plugin will be considerably slower than the Word or LibreOffice plugins for technical reasons. We've created a new, much faster version that you can enable from the Advanced pane of the Zotero Connector preferences, but unfortunately it can sometimes fail with an error in some documents due to a Google Docs bug that we're still waiting for Google to fix.
  • ilishio
    Hello,

    Thank you for replying. Not it is not a large document, it is currently about 6 pages of words. I have just checked my chrome browser extensions too and I only have 5 essential ones running. The document is 6 pages and I have about 5 citations so far.
    How do I enable the new version please?
  • dstillman
    Again, you should try disabling "Automatically update citations" and temproarily disabling all third-party extensions and reloading Google Docs before doing anything else.

    If it's still slow after that, we'd want to see a Debug ID from Zotero for an operation that's slow.
  • ilishio
    Hello and thanks,

    Do you really mean that you have to disable all plugins before using Zotero? Surely not as that would mean I can't download PDFs to read as I write, and it also seems odd that I can't have it automatically update, as I thought that was the benefit of using Zotero?

    Is it slow everyone?

    Thank you,
  • dstillman
    You're misunderstanding this.

    Temporarily disabling other browser extensions is a basic troubleshooting step to see if there's a conflict.

    And disabling "Automatically update citations" doesn't stop the plugin from working. It just changes how updates work to speed things up in larger documents.

    If you're not going to do the things we suggest, there's no point in posting here.
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