classic view vs new

annie-kennedy

Is there a way to set Zotero to open in classic view by default every time I cite in a word document?

I have experienced many errors with this new red bar option (I'm not sure what this view is called) and sometimes it causes me to lose my work.

For example:

I have just clicked 'add citation' in my Word document through the Zotero tab, but didn't realise that I hadn't yet saved that particular resource. Since there is no way to exit out of that red bar, I saved the source and went back to the document to cite again. Because the red bar was already open, somehow I have caused an error, which lost my recent work. Thankfully I hadn't long ago saved the document, or I would have lost everything, but it was still very frustrating to have to rewrite parts of my report.

All that to say, is there a way around this?

Thank you.

dstillman

You can set it to default to the classic dialog in the Cite pane of the preferences, but this just sounds like a misunderstanding. The default (red bar) citation dialog has been the default dialog for well over a decade and is the recommended way of using Zotero. You can exit out of it by pressing Esc.

I’m not sure what you mean re: losing work, but it sounds like maybe you typed into an active Zotero citation. That could cause you to lose what you typed with either dialog, and you should avoid doing it. Zotero citations and placeholders are standard Word fields and should be highlighted in gray when your cursor is within them, but you can set field shading to “Always” in the Word settings so that you can always see where they begin and end.

But again, you can and should just press Esc to close the red bar without inserting a citation — you should never leave it open.