Humongous Word Files

wildbill

I write papers in Word with loads of footnotes. I'm finding that when I get to 50 or more footnotes from Zotero, the Word file starts to get huge. Some of my papers end up being 9 megabytes or larger-- way too large to email. This is obviously a problem. The other problem is that footnoting after I get 70 or so footnotes becomes EXTREMELY slow. (But okay, that could by my computer's problem.)

Evidently Zotero adds loads of invisible stuff (coding?) to make footnoting work.

Here's the work-around I devised: upload the finished file to Google Docs and then resave it as a Word file. That will strip out all the extra stuff but of course remove the ability to communicate between footnotes and Zotero.

I have two questions: Are other people experiencing this problem, and if there a fix in the works?

Thank you.

Tjowens

Instead of using Google docs you can have Word flatten all your fields. Simply select all and click Ctrl-Shift-F9. Keep in mind that your document will no longer be connected to your Zotero database, so if you change things in the database or want to add additional references they will not interact with the footnotes and bibliography you flattened.

Relating to your speed issues. Several users have reported that their documents work much faster if you do not add the Bibliography until you get to the end. That might help you speed things up.