After changing quotation style everything gone

loquito

Hey there, i´m just writing my bachelor thesis. I wanted to change the quotation style and now everything is gone! I just have numbers and letters mixed over the whole document!! PLEAAASE, can someone help me?? I use a Macbook and Word 2011. After the document got messed up I saved the document under another name, closed it and opened it again, hoping that it would work again. But it´s not! Please help me
Claudio

adamsmith

First, please try to give a more precise description of what happened. Did the citations disappear or actually "everything," i.e. the entire document?

Have you tried changing the citation style back to the one you used before? Which citation style did you change to?

After the document got messed up I saved the document under another name, closed it and opened it again, hoping that it would work again

Probably not helpful, but just to note that that was a mistake: there is pretty much nothing you can do in Word that you wouldn't be able to undo using the undo function--but the memory of that is erased if you close the document.

loquito

Thanks for the fast response.
I used Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. Then I changed it to "Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften". Afterwards I changed it to "Deutsches Archäologisches Institut".
Afterwards I changed it, the document got really messed up. Word was working really slow. I thought I could make it undone by going back using the undo function. There were like 1500 steps, something with a name like "apple", till the last step I did in the document. So I went back. Afterwards the document got even more messed up...

adamsmith

sorry, but "messed up" is really not a description we can work with...

loquito

There is no normal phrase, just numbers and scrambled text

loquito

is it possible to upload a screenshot?

adamsmith

post to a free image hosting site (imgur.com, dropbox) and link to it here.

loquito

Ok thanks!
http://imgur.com/rU53wEl

aurimas

Don't know what happened exactly, but it looks like the character encoding went from single character to double (or something like that). In a copy of your document, search and replace all 5 with nothing (I.e. delete all 5s)

aurimas

But also, is that screenshot from after you performed all the different switching of styles and undoing?

Can you describe exactly what you did to change the quotation style (if you can post the style you ended up using somewhere like Dropbox or http://gist.github.com that would be helpful). After you changed the style contents, what did you do to install it?

How did you trigger an update afterwards? Did you switch to a different style and back? Did you press Refresh citations? At what step exactly did the corrupted document appear? What did the corruption look like at first (you say it got much worse later)?

How many references had you added to your document? How long is your document? If you can email it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread, that may be helpful.

Sorry for all the questions, but these are the kinds of details we need to know to try and help you (and to figure out how to fix this for future versions).

fbennett

Could this be an instance of the Mac Word 2011 asterisk bug?

If Update 14.1.2 has not yet been applied to Mac for Word 2011 on the machine for some reason, that would be the tell.

@loquito: If you are able, check whether that update has been applied to Word on the machine. Don't take any other action; aurimas will provide guidance.

(@aurimas: I don't know Mac OSX or Word ... how do you check whether an update has been applied?)

aurimas

Yes, I was also thinking about the asterisk bug, but all reports I've seen have been exclusively asterisks. It's possible that the fix was incomplete and now manifests this way. I believe the patch on the Mac would have increased the version number

We would need to get version numbers for all involved software: OS X, word. Zotero, Zotero word plugin, Firefox (if that's what you're using)

(@fbennett On Windows, you can see the list of installed patches either in the update history or in "add/remove programs" (that's what it used to be called anyway) under control panel

fbennett

This post says it sometimes replaced everything with page numbers:

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111119194737AAH4PQa

I was thinking that the undo/redo operations in the document might have created the mixture.

aurimas

Ah, that could be good news, since supposedly the update makes the documents appear normal again. Good find!

loquito

I firt used oxford. Than I changed to Geistes Kulturwissenschaften by using the zotero set doc prefs button. Afterwards I change I downloaded the style "deutsches archäologisches institut" by opening firefox, starting zotero and pressing the action button, which looks like a rack-wheel. As I changed from geistes kulturwissenschaften to deutsches acrhäologisches insitut it got messed up. I don´t have screen shots of that. Like I said I used the undo button and went back for like 1500 steps.I did not press refresh. I have like 170 quotations and the document has 50 pages.
Every time I open word it gets really slow. There is no option to update word...
Some more pics:
http://imgur.com/rOfV8nk,1X5ekp0,4FbLd3U,c01EtTT#0
http://imgur.com/rOfV8nk,1X5ekp0,4FbLd3U,c01EtTT#2
http://imgur.com/rOfV8nk,1X5ekp0,4FbLd3U,c01EtTT#3
http://imgur.com/IOUPwzk
http://imgur.com/XcXbQR7
http://imgur.com/ETpSvQ9
http://imgur.com/jxUEFfL
http://imgur.com/abRmXM4

loquito

I hate Zotero!!! There are a lot of names missing. There is just the name Anon instead of the real name!!! What should I do??? I´m almost crying

aurimas

It certainly does look like those numbers correspond to the pages they were inserted on. I'm fairly sure you're encountering the "asterisk" bug in Word, which has nothing to do with Zotero (it could have happened even if you weren't using Zotero) See http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macword/all-i-see-are-numbers/9e5949f4-ef62-4959-b0e0-efd3fcf5b62b and http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macword/word-file-turns-into-blank-pages-with-all-numbers/d8a022cf-6cbd-4517-917a-27770fb300c1 I'm sorry to say, but it seems that unless you have a backup of the document, there is no way to recover. You can upload the document to dropbox and share the link here publicly or email it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread if you don't want the file to become public (Dan, can you forward that to me?) and we can take a look to see if there is anything recoverable (it looks like there's at least some recoverable text in there). This is really outside of the scope of Zotero support though (again, this is purely a Word bug).

Shouldn't you be able to recover the document via Time Machine?

fbennett

As aurimas says, if you have a backup of the file (in Time Machine, in a separately saved copy, or a copy created automatically by Word's AutoBackup), restore the old file and work from that.

If no backup copy is available, and aurimas is not able to extract text from the corrupted file, and recovery is critical ...

Here is a report from a Word for Mac user who was able to restore a file after being bitten by this bug. It is a time-consuming process, it involves the use of a commercial file recovery tool, and it would not be guaranteed to recover the specific file that you need; but it may be something to try, if recovery of the content is extremely important.

(As aurimas says, this is not a Zotero bug. It is a bug in the Word for Mac word processor.)

loquito

Thanks for the help. But I actually don´t think that it is the Word bug which messed up the document. It never happened before and it just happened after I did the described steps. I fortunately uploaded the file 3 days before to my email account so I "just" lost the work of these days. I´ll write the chapters again. I sent you the document via Mail. I guess it will not work.
Thanks again!!

aurimas

I took a look at the document. The only remaining text in the file are some plain text references that were inserted by Zotero. The remainder of the data was replaced by <w:pgNum/>. I'm guessing that the bug triggered in the middle of Zotero updating the document, at which point _everything_ was replaced by page numbers. Zotero then proceeded to add some additional text.

I actually don´t think that it is the Word bug which messed up the document. It never happened before and it just happened after I did the described steps.

You don't have to believe us. If you look at this report, you'll see that the user experienced the same exact problem. It doesn't matter that this has never happened before, there's always going to be a first time. Besides, the number of reports indicates that this is a very rare bug and I haven't seen any indication as to what exactly triggers it. You're welcome to keep blaming Zotero, but I would advise you to direct your frustration and further bug reporting to Microsoft who can actually fix this and _maybe_ prevent such things happening in the future. There is absolutely nothing Zotero can do to prevent this from happening again. It's likely that if this happens again, it will happen at a random point and Zotero will not be involved.

If you read up on the issue, there are some precautions you can take that would help you mediate the damage in the future. I think the best choice is probably frequent versioned backups of your hard drive (via Time Machine or similar). I think the biggest issue here is that Word automatically saves the file very frequently (every 1 minute, I believe), which makes it difficult to _force_ quit Word fast enough for these changes to not be written to file. You can decrease that interval to something more manageable (like 5 minutes), but this won't help if you manage to trigger the bug right before the auto-save. Another useful setting that I've seen is making Word create a backup copy of the document when hitting save (or Cmd+S). This would make sure that auto-save only overwrites one of the copies.

Had this issue happened to me, I'd be pissed as well and, given that the fix (which, based on you not being able to update Word, you already have) is incomplete, I would strongly consider switching word processors. LibreOffice is your next best bet for Zotero integration. Pages is obviously another choice, but there is no Zotero add-in for Pages (there are some workarounds). Besides EndNote, I'm not aware of any reference manager that works with Pages (Papers works with Pages before version 5).

tupimek

Good.
That was my problem before.
When entering a date and update, all text was changed to numbers.
Now I do the same, just refresh, it is not changed by numbers but when trying saved, the document puts everything in white.
I must say I have some 430 references and eternal refresh process is done, about 20 minutes.