Upgrade StorageWord Crashes When Adding Zotero Citations
Adding a citation consistently crashes Word on my PC. My version of Zotero as of today is 5.0.97-beta.7+8f7afb4a5; Office is Professional Plus 2016; Windows 10. The issue precedes my current version of Zotero by several years.
My best guess is that there is a long-standing problem with Zotero's ability to function with Word's Track Changes feature. The problem has occurred whether I have turned on Track Changes, have it turned on and am currently working on text edited with tracked changes, and have it turned off and working on text edited with tracked changes. File sizes range from a few pages with no images to many pages in length with several images.
There is one semi-consistent concurrent issue. When Word recovers the file, there are random fixes to headers at the beginning of the document. It's not all the time, but probably about 33% of the time, so perhaps worth mentioning.
I've taken the same Word files with all changes accepted and reinserted the text as plain text to ensure that there are no special formats. Adding citations seems to be issue-free based on a handful of trials on the trial documents.
I have had this problem with Zotero in Word for a few year now at work. Often the problem occurs a couple of times and then there is enough stability to proceed crash-free for a day or so. It's getting to the point that I think I might need to give up on using Zotero because hand-typing or switching to EndNote would be less painful at this point. Please help. Thank you.
My best guess is that there is a long-standing problem with Zotero's ability to function with Word's Track Changes feature. The problem has occurred whether I have turned on Track Changes, have it turned on and am currently working on text edited with tracked changes, and have it turned off and working on text edited with tracked changes. File sizes range from a few pages with no images to many pages in length with several images.
There is one semi-consistent concurrent issue. When Word recovers the file, there are random fixes to headers at the beginning of the document. It's not all the time, but probably about 33% of the time, so perhaps worth mentioning.
I've taken the same Word files with all changes accepted and reinserted the text as plain text to ensure that there are no special formats. Adding citations seems to be issue-free based on a handful of trials on the trial documents.
I have had this problem with Zotero in Word for a few year now at work. Often the problem occurs a couple of times and then there is enough stability to proceed crash-free for a day or so. It's getting to the point that I think I might need to give up on using Zotero because hand-typing or switching to EndNote would be less painful at this point. Please help. Thank you.
1. Technically this is a Word problem. Zotero uses Word's own provided APIs for the functionality of the plugin, so whatever is causing Word to crash is a bug in Word and at best we can work around them.
2. Unless there is a way to consistently reproduce a bug like this it is nigh-impossible to fix it for Microsoft or Zotero.
Unfortunately it's not out of the question that the same bug that you see with Zotero might eventually occur with EndNote too.
@dstillman I'm not too optimistic if the API doesn't change in those updated versions, but I'll find out this fall. Apparently, we're upgrading to M365 then.
"Current versions of EndNote (X9 or higher) are compatible with track changes as long as you set the track changes view to Simple Mark Up or No Mark Up. You can find more information about it here (https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/article/EndNote-Issues-with-Track-Changes?language=en_US).
If you would like to view your track changes while inserting citations, make sure EndNote’s Instant Formatting is off in Word. Once you’ve completed the drafting phase, set your track changes view to Simple Mark Up or No Mark Up and turn Instant Formatting back on."