Still having trouble with Word on Mac

jdriddle

Hi there,

When I try to insert a footnote into a very long document (300+ pages), Zotero does one of two things:

1. Tries to insert a citation, but then gets stuck on the solid red bar for an indefinite amount of time (at the end of which, sometimes, it inserts the footnote).

2. Simply brings up the main Zotero software without attempting to insert a footnote at all.

I do not experience this problem in a new, blank document, so I have followed all of the steps that I could on "Troubleshooting Errors in Word Processor Documents" page. The only thing I have not done is go citation-by-citation looking for the problem, as I have 800+ citations in the document.

Zotero Report ID: 974586933
MacOS: Ventura 13.5.1
Word on Mac: 16.71.1
Zotero: 6.0.27

Thanks in advance for any help!

adamsmith

You're just hitting performance limits on Zotero with Word for Mac. While it works fine for article or chapter-length pieces, it's super slow in large documents (I believe improvements are planned). Best advice I can give is to split the document up in chunk and only re-assemble at the last minute. Or work in LibreOffice or Word for Windows.

jdriddle

Thanks, @adamsmith. I guess that explains why I'm not having the same problems when I work with the same document on Windows (something I should have mentioned originally).

Do you think updating to Zotero 7 beta would help?

I can try breaking the document up, but that doesn't suit my workflow as I bounce around the manuscript constantly. Ditto for using only my Windows machine.

adamsmith

I don't think Zotero 7 will help much, I'm afraid. The software is much faster, but the bottleneck here is the connection to Word, which hasn't changed.

jdriddle

Alas. But thanks, @adamsmith!