Upgrade StorageRefresh error in MS Word 2008 for Mac
Hello --
I very carefully spent hours cleaning up my citations. I followed instructions about deleting a citation and I moved some citations.
Now I'm trying to refresh the citations, according to instructions.
I ran into this error
_______________________
You have modified this citation since Zotero generated it.
Clicking "Yes" will prevent Zotero from updating this citation if you add additional citations, switch styles, or modify the item to which it refers. Clicking "No" will erase your changes.
Original: blah blah blah [not sure if this means the modified citation or the prior citation]
Modified: [blank -- ??]
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I cannot make head or tail of what clicking "No" means vs "Yes." It seems either will be disastrous for my paper, because I will need to change styles for my final submission.
Please clarify the meaning of these two choices.
Is there a way to figure out which fields Zotero updated and which it did not, which it destroyed, and if it got stuck somewhere and didn't refresh fields after that? Is the blinking the only way to tell it's working? How can you tell it's finished?
Thanks.
PS It looks to me like if you delete a citation or move it, you need to refresh for each event or you'll never be able to figure out what you're doing.
I very carefully spent hours cleaning up my citations. I followed instructions about deleting a citation and I moved some citations.
Now I'm trying to refresh the citations, according to instructions.
I ran into this error
_______________________
You have modified this citation since Zotero generated it.
Clicking "Yes" will prevent Zotero from updating this citation if you add additional citations, switch styles, or modify the item to which it refers. Clicking "No" will erase your changes.
Original: blah blah blah [not sure if this means the modified citation or the prior citation]
Modified: [blank -- ??]
________________________
I cannot make head or tail of what clicking "No" means vs "Yes." It seems either will be disastrous for my paper, because I will need to change styles for my final submission.
Please clarify the meaning of these two choices.
Is there a way to figure out which fields Zotero updated and which it did not, which it destroyed, and if it got stuck somewhere and didn't refresh fields after that? Is the blinking the only way to tell it's working? How can you tell it's finished?
Thanks.
PS It looks to me like if you delete a citation or move it, you need to refresh for each event or you'll never be able to figure out what you're doing.
(Also, you either left out a sentence from the dialog or are getting an earlier version of the dialog text because you're using Word 2008 and have an old version of the plugin. The current dialog text includes the line "Do you want to keep your modifications and prevent future updates?" The "Yes" and "No" buttons are admittedly confusing, but we're currently limited to those for technical reasons.)
If you make widespread changes to active citations and then try to use the plugin, you're going to get this message for every single citation that you updated.
Editing citations this way is almost always the incorrect approach, though, and it certainly makes no sense if you're later going to change styles. Data problems — capitalization, incorrect characters — should always be fixed in Zotero itself, not in the document, and you should customize citations using the prefix/suffix options and/or the Suppress Author option in the citation dialog for discursive citations. If you're unsure how to fix something properly without modifying the citation, let us know.
For certain rare scenarios, you can leave some notes in the text for things to fix, use Unlink Citations in a copy of the document right before submitting it, and then apply the manual corrections to the flat text.
If you want to fix the citations properly as I describe above, you can revert them by switching to a clearly different style and then looking for citations that haven't been updated. If you click in those and click Add/Edit Citation, it will prompt you to revert your changes.
"Do you want to keep your modifications and prevent future updates?" did appear in my error message. Still very confusing! Does this mean the citation cannot be edited further?
When you have the opportunity, please add a full explanation of this error message in the documentation. Still don't understand implications of "Yes" or "No" choice. A citation that can't be updated? Does it generate a bibliography item? Can I delete it and replace it with a live citation? (That would be a workaround for the error.) Perhaps the script could highlight these broken citations in some way?
"you can revert them by switching to a clearly different style and then looking for citations that haven't been updated." This is a problem. My memory is not so good I can recall maybe 100 sets of citations. I would have had to go through all my citations again -- this is a heavily cited paper -- review each of them again, and make the decisions again about which to keep. (I am very much relieved that Refresh seemed to run smoothly on my copy, which I will make the final draft.)
I did not edit on the document within a citation set. Where I needed to change an item within a set, I used Edit Citation. I followed what I thought were the instructions for deleting a citation set or moving a citation set, found in the forums: Move or delete and then refresh.
I was careful to capture margins of text on both sides of the citations when I moved them, to make sure I moved all the code with the citation set. Was this the right way to do it?
The Zotero Word plug-in documentation https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage could use a section on moving or deleting citation sets; suggest adding "when you move a citation or delete a clump of citations, immediately refresh so you can debug the change and reinsert the citation set if you need to."
I think my error was planning to refresh the document all at once instead of after each delete or move. The Zotero plug-in has been so stable so far, I thought that was the way to go.
So, can I assume that the plug-in has done a complete refresh when the blinking stops, absent error messages?
Using Track Changes can also cause lots of problems with citations. No, there's no problem with that. Again, this really shouldn't happen with normal usage of Zotero unless you're making edits to the citation text.
Then NO would be the better choice, as you can update the citation again (using the Edit Citation red bar or correcting the Zotero entry) before you get confused about what you're doing. (I'd take a screenshot of the error message first, it contains the updates.)
If you get this error message and click either NO or YES, can you be assured the Zotero plug-in has updated all the other citations in the document? Or does it get stalled at an error?
(It seems there would be little use case for YES, you're buying yourself a bunch of additional document QA.)
"If you're getting this message, you somehow changed the citation text — that's what this is about. If you're using the classic citation dialog (as opposed to the default red bar), editing the citation in the dialog would be the same thing as editing it in the document. The point is that you shouldn't edit the citation text directly. You should either edit the metadata in Zotero or customize the citation as explained in the documentation I linked to above."
Now I'm really confused. Is using Edit Citation with the red bar the proper way to change a citation in a set? I didn't change the phrasing of any citations, is that what you're referring to with editing metadata and customizing citations?
As I said, I was able to update the backup copy with no error messages, so it doesn't seem I committed any sins in editing, moving, or deleting sets of citations -- MS Word may have hiccupped in my original attempt.
Through this experience, I did find it would be very helpful to have more explicit documentation about how to move and delete sets of citations, which is probably a very common activity, to minimize risk of error.
More documentation about how to interpret the error message would also be helpful to those who actually do edit their citations in the document. The wording of the error message could be clearer. Suggest:
_______________________
You have manually modified this citation since Zotero generated it. Was this intentional?
Click "YES" to keep your changes, making this a manual citation. This breaks the link to Zotero. It will not update this citation.
Click "NO" to retain the link to Zotero. This will revert your changes. You may update the entry in Zotero or customize the citation using the Zotero plug-in.
Do you want to make this a manual citation?
[YES] [NO]
Original: blah blah blah
Modified: [since this is blank, is it necessary?]
________________________
It will appear as Zotero processes the citations in order, for every citation you modified since the last refresh. If you don't get some other error, everything should have updated correctly. If you force-quit Word, your document will be left in an undefined state. Generally, you should answer No and change your workflow, but Yes is Yes because it's the option that doesn't delete your changes. People are going to make manual edits, even if they shouldn't, and it's not necessarily a problem to continue working in a document after saying Yes. The degree of resulting incorrectness depends on the style you're using and what other citations you add or delete in the document. What do you mean by "change a citation in a set"? You can certainly add or remove other citations in a multi-part citation by adding or removing the blue bubbles without triggering this dialog.
All this dialog means is that the text of the citation diverged from what it's supposed to be based on the underlying data. That can happen by typing in the document, editing the text in the classic citation dialog, accidentally deleting part of a citation, or having something go wrong with Track Changes. Generally people get this when they try to correct something in the citation (e.g., fix a misspelling, add a missing component, add a page number), and that's why I explained above the better ways of doing those things. If that's not what you did, then you can ignore that. It's not blank in general — it shows whatever's currently in the text of the citation, as I've explained above. If you're seeing it blank for every instance of this message, something very strange happened in your document, perhaps due to Track Changes or incorrect cutting/pasting. You can toggle Word field codes back and forth to find citations that are blank for some reason. Making sure Word is set to always use shading for fields rather than only shading them when they're selected can also help you make sure you haven't left parts of citations behind.
If you can reproduce getting this dialog in a new document for something that you don't think should trigger it, let us know, but it should work the way I describe above, and you should be able to see the expected behavior in a new document if you try to modify a citation's text by hand.
We'll see what we can do to clarify the dialog text.