Upgrade StorageZotero crashes with Word on Mac
I am using Zotero 4.0 with Word on Mac. I have trouble attaching references on Word. Word and Zotero both crash whenever I want to add a reference with Zotero. I wonder if it comes from the fact that I might have too many references in my library (about 700) ? It happens either when I use Zotero standalone or Zotero with Firefox. Thank you for your help.
What exact version of Zotero and Word are you using?
It’s definitley not a problem with the size of your library. 700 Items is relatively small.
After that, based on your description, it doesn't actually sound like either applications is "crashing", only taking some time to complete the operation. Are the 700 references actually all cited in your Word document or just existing in your library? Do you experience the same problem if you try to insert a citation into a new empty Word document?
If you actually have 700 references in the Word document, that would explain the slowness—Word (particularly Word for Mac) does get slower in a document with many fields (whether from Zotero, page numbers, Figure Captions, Tables of Contents, Cross-References, etc., and Zotero itself also slows down with a large number of references.
There is currently a major update to the Word plugin functionality being worked on for Zotero 5.0 that will speed things up dramatically. In the meantime, you can workaround the slowness by doing one or more of the following:
1. Delete the bibliography and then reinsert after you've finished writing.
2. Insert new citations into an empty document, then cut-and-paste into your actual document.
3. Switch to an author-date style that doesn't change formatting based on first versus subsequent appearance of citations (e.g., Annual Reviews Author-Date), then switch back to your actual style when you are done writing.
With any of these changes, re-insert your bibliography and/or click "Refresh" in the Zotero tab when you are done writing to run one final update of your document. This might take a while, but you would only have to let it update once.
I updated to Zotero 5.0 and it is working now. But I also kept the old version in my applications just in case. I don't actually have 700 references in one document but I have about 200. I did not edit the bibliography yet so that it wouldn't take too much space in the document.
I will use your advice on cutting-and-pasting the citations from an empty document.
However, I don't know how to switch to an author-date style. I chose the Vancouver style when creating the document and I don't know how to change the style once I have started writing.