value or data type incorrect, overflow

corgeon

Hi everyone,

I have a big problem with Zotero 1.0.10 coupled with OpenOffice 3.1.0.
I'm writing a big document (my PhD thesis) with several citations I insert thanks to Zotero. But today, when I inserted my 183rd citation an error message appeared :
(Translation from French)

Value or data type incorrect. Overflow.

And OpenOffice.org Basic has been opened with an highlighted line :

mTagStart(nTagIndex) = Len(sResultText)

I'm not easy with computer science, but it seems that I inserted the maximum of citations in my text. The real problem is that I need to insert a lot of new references in my text, which must be entirely written for the beginning of September.

Any idea about how to solve this problem ?

By advance, thank you for your help.

alexuw

I don't know if there is an absolute limit to the number of citations. But for me, there is a performance problem with OpenOffice. After inserting about 50 citations, it starts to take longer and longer to insert each citation. I've never gotten close to 183 citations! However, the bad news is that I don't think OpenOffice / zotero is usable for a long document.

Here are two suggestions. (1) break up your document into multiple, smaller documents - using the "Master Document" feature of OpenOffice writer. (2) paste in the text generated by zotero - in zotero, select the item, and hit ctrl-alt-c to copy, then paste into your document or footnote. (Obviously, you lose a lot of functionality that way.)

If you want to use master documents see this discussion - I haven't tried this, so I don't know how well it works.

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/6431/working-with-master-documents-in-openoffice/

Jon Rubin

Well, I've finished a book with 209 references in the bibliography using OO 3.1 and Zotero. However, I was also using the beta version of Zotero and (what I think is most relevant) the latest plug-in for openoffice.
So, do think about switching. For referencing, I found Zotero to be rock solid and haven't had any (major) syncing problems recently either. If you don't need to sync and do need to write a long document, do consider upgrading your Zotero.
Usual cautions apply: do back up both your Zotero database and whatever documents you're working on beforehand.

Regards,
Jon.