GoogleDoc to MSWord

teisenman

Hello – I created a 7,500 word article with roughly 80 citations in GoogleDocs, then downloaded the file to MS Word, in which I made several new figures and additional text edits. I now plan on finishing the document in MS Word.

When I click on in-text citations or in the bibliography, this activates the opening of a web browser window taking me to the Zotero website. This leads me to believe that the citations in the MS Word doc are still "active" in Zotero. But when I try to add a new citation in the MS Word doc, Zotero asked me to first identify the preferred style, and having done that, I added a new citation and then added a new bibliography, but the bibliography showed up as a new stand along bibliography separate from the original bibliography.

My hunch is that it's too late to reactivate the original links between in-text and bibliography in the MSWord doc. But, again, the fact that when I click on either in-text citations or bibliography I get taken to the Zotero website makes me think that there may still be a way to reactivate the links in my MSWord file.

Advice?

Thanks,
-Theo

bwiernik

You can’t just download the Word document from Google Docs. First, you need to click the Zotero menu in Google Docs and click Switch Word Processors.

dstillman

(And the Google Docs plugin shows a warning to that effect when you try to download an unprepared document with Zotero citations as .docx, as long as you've clicked within a Zotero citation in that session.)

teisenman

I did exactly what bweirnik said, which is what allowed me to convert the Googledoc to MSWord.

So, am I understanding correctly that the original citations in the MS Word doc can no longer be merged (within Zoom) with new citations that I now add?

dstillman

If the citations are zotero.org links, they weren't transferred properly, and that would happen if you downloaded the .docx without performing the transfer step first. Note that, when you use "Switch word processors", it changes the entire document, adding a warning paragraph to the top and converting all citations to huge blocks of code, and when you open that in Word and use the plugin it converts it back to a usable document with proper active citations. Unless you recall all of that happening, you likely didn't use "Switch word processors".

I'm afraid there's no way to restore unlinked citations, so you'd need to transfer the original document properly out of Google Docs to continue working with the citations in Word.

teisenman

Ok – that's what I figured. It's not a huge problem, as I don't have that many new citations to add. Thanks.