Changes to Word or Zotero between 7/9/2020 and 7/10

kelly.grant

My Team and I have been working on a MS Word document full of citations and as of this morning, none of us can add new citations. It looks like Microsoft might have pushed an update (Edge icon is updated). We also had to change the storage location of the document because of crashes. It's now stored on MS Teams, instead of OneDrive. If anyone has insights, I'd appreciate it. Thanks, Kelly

dstillman

There were no changes in Zotero, and if there were a general problem with Word the forums would be filled with reports.

Storing your document in OneDrive can cause errors when citing with Zotero, though we've never been able to reproduce it. If you're seeing that reliably, we'd want to see Debug ID for an operation that triggers the error (as well as an explanation of the exact problem, so we're sure we're on the same page).

You should test whether the problem is fixed by copying the document to your local disk and trying to insert a citation into that document.

kelly.grant

Thanks! The Zotero problem seemed to occur when 3 of us were editing the document at once. Once I was the only one editing, Zotero worked again. Could there be incompatibilities/inconsistencies between our Zotero versions? Do you think Teams is better than OneNote (ironically, we had general document problems with OneNote, which is why we switched to Teams, which was when the Zotero problems started)? In general, the document was acting buggy on Friday when "Uploads Failed" at various points. And, several times I had to resolve conflicts.

adomasven

The Word integration was developed much earlier than Word introducing the ability for multiple users to edit a document and as such isn't designed for that. We've tested it with multiple users and it seems to function adequately, but the testing wasn't extensive and it could be the case that multiple users actively editing a doc could interrupt the Zotero plugin from working correctly. If you have internet connection issues or there's problems with Microsoft's Cloud services, that could definitely compound the problems.

kelly.grant

Thanks for your help. We may have pushed all the technology to the max on this document. I appreciate your insight!

bwiernik

If I remember correctly from the last time I worked with the live editing in Word, the problem mainly happens if you try to insert a citation in a paragraph that another user is simultaneously editing.

kelly.grant

I don't think we were that close to each other in the document, but the little flags that show where other people are typing were slow to update, so that could have been the cause. Thanks for your assistance.