Compatibility with Office 2007 bibliography feature

athelas · December 7, 2006

New MS Office incorporates a nice bibliography feature. It would be very handy to be able to export data from Zotero directly to word. For bibliography they are using open plain XML schema, so I think it would be possible, however the xmlns link (http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/bibliography) is not live yet.

I know this is bowing in front of so hated MS and it is their fault that they didn't include any import filters, but this is how it is and as long as they are monopol... anyway.

Thank you!

bdarcus · December 7, 2006

Three problems with the new support in Word:

1. they don't support author-date formatting correctly (nor will they without customer uproar; it was no oversight, but a conscious decision)

2. they don't support note-based citations

3. styling is configured with XSLT (you have to write code to create new styles)

So it's not so straightforward as simply exporting to their format if you want to support the citation needs of social scientists and humanities. The existing XSLT-based formatting engine really needs to be replaced.

athelas · December 7, 2006

Thank you for your answer, but I don't understand what has any of your points to do with the ability to simple export PART of the data from one XML format (Zotero RDF) into another (MS Bibliography schema).

How MS screws things up inside Word is not Zotero's business, all I need is a crosswalk between fields where it can be done, feed the author, title, url into Word base because that is the program I am (and million other users are) using.

My idea is to use this eventual feature for small papers, where I can export part of the Zotero library, load bibliography data into word and then pull out items as needed and let word create the list of references. I don't worry about what Word does not support, I can add that manually if need be. I don't need notes, links, tags,... in Word. But those 6-8 basic bibliography fields definitely are supported and that is all I (and a lot of others) need.