Zotero interfering with Microsoft Word?

sutoambe

Hey,

So I finally broke down and updated to Zotero standalone this morning, and it's been giving me a ton of issues. Most of them are minor annoyances, but the main issue at the moment is that it's been preventing Microsoft Word from autosaving, and then had a communication issue and caused Word to crash. I just lost three hours of work.

There's no way for me to recover my work now, which is fun. Is there anyway to fix the issue on my end, or do I just have to hope for an update? (I'm not hoping for much in that case. Updating to standalone this morning took nearly an hour to get up and running.)

dstillman

it's been preventing Microsoft Word from autosaving

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but Zotero has no effect on Word except when you click its buttons. So any other problem you have in Word isn't caused by Zotero. The plugin simply inserts normal Word fields into the document and then isn't running the rest of the time.

then had a communication issue and caused Word to crash

You'd get a communication error if Zotero wasn't open when you tried to cite. If by "crash" you mean that Word quit with an error, that's a Word bug. What version of Word and what OS is this?

Updating to standalone this morning took nearly an hour to get up and running.

What happened? It should really be as simple as installing Zotero and opening it.

sutoambe

I'm using Word '07 on Windows. Maybe because it's an older version of Word it isn't as compatible with the new Zotero? The autosave function was working fine before I updated Zotero and started adding citations.

Honestly, I don't know what the issue with the update was either. At first it wouldn't download--I ended up having to flip between a few different browsers--and then when it downloaded it refused to open.

dstillman

Again, though, even with Word 2007, simply having the Zotero Word plugin installed wouldn't have any effect on saving, because the plugin doesn't run in the background, only when you click its buttons. If you want to verify this, you can uninstall the Zotero.dot file from the Word startup folder.

If you found this only happened in documents with Zotero citations in them and didn't happen in other documents, there could be a bug in Word 2007 when saving documents with Word fields, but that's pretty unlikely.