Adam
All I end up with if the author is suppressed is, in the case I quoted, (2009) i.e Work by (2009) states that... Surely then I would have to manually insert the author, in this case Bloggs to form the citation Bloggs (2009). As I said initially, perhaps I am being really stupid and missing the obvious (especially as I did see a post that said suppressing the author solved this problem). Can you explain in detail?

Ok Adam, I accept your explanation and thank you for it.
However my real scenario is it's my wife doing her university assignments and she wants to alternate citation styles. I'm just the IT man! To her Zotero is the means to an end (and a very good one in general)...how it works and the more esoteric concepts don't matter to her - she just wants it to do what she wants and my (tweaked for her assignments) get the exact style of Harvard referencing she needs!!
So, if I haven't missed anything obvious, it looks like I may be able to examine the Word .dot template and intercept the formation of the citation before it gets inserted and offer her a dialog box with the 2 options she needs. That's all I can think of doing to solve her problem - she'll never need to switch "fundamental" styles at least while on her present course.

Here's a thread where this has been discussed. The synopsis version is that the issue (automatically supplying the author name in-text on a per-cite basis) is known, and there is some experimental work on parts of what might go into an implementation, but no decision has been made yet about whether to go further. For the present, just manually typing in the author names for such cites, as adamsmith suggests, is the way to go.

So this means that if the unknowing user edits the citation in the editor then they get a non-updatable citation - not the best behaviour!

on the contrary. Intended behavior. Imagine I spend a lot of time editing some details in citations using the editor, then refresh my document and *woosh* all my edits are gone.
Now you may say - "well, the edits could remain, just the citation would update" - but once you start thinking about that that's entirely unfeasible: While "orderly" edits - i.e. prefix and suffix - do indeed update, how would you deal with, say, a deleted colon between date and title as you switch between APA and Chicago Manual of Style? And that's essentially true for all the edits that require the editor - there would be no way to refresh those in a useful way, so the best default is to leave edited citations as they are.

Edit: In your critique of the "suppress author" option, you fail to note the - imho crucial - argument that words (in this case author names) that are part of the text should remain part of the text and not be dealt with by your bibliographic software. This both for practical (style switching) and systematic reasons.

but how is Zotero to tell? People may change the title in the editor. Or add an author.
In many ways, anything that _doesn't_ involve changing the content of the fields doesn't require use of the editor, but can and should be taken care of at the level of the style.
Using the editor function should be a last, last resort for exactly that reason.

As for "formatting" - that's a lot more complex that you make it out to be. For example, we've had one discussion where someone pointed out that a (foreign language) citation style required a period between title and subtitle, even if the original had a colon. Now - if someone changes that colon to a period in the editor, you would not want refreshing to revert that, right? But there is a technically indistinguishable situation, where someone may correct punctuation in a title in the database and then _would_ want refreshing to take account of that. Point being - there is no clean solution to this.

Maybe that needs to be better documented (though I don't think I've seen a single question on the forum that was based on a mis- or lack of understanding of this).

no, don't worry, you're getting your point across.
All I'm trying to do is to highlight why particular design choices in Zotero have been made the way they are.
Which I would hope can both lead to you making custom-changes in a more informed way and seeing the types of issues that any suggestions for changes in the main Zotero code that you may have would have to grapple with in order to convince people.

Technically, yes, the limitation is the plugin. What could be done about it in terms of coding is beyond my expertise.

While I don't speak in any capacity for the developers, I think I have some ideas of why these design choices were made. As you will discover, Zotero in general does not encourage customization. You can, for example, not create custom item types, nor add custom fields to items. (Though some of that may change as a result of the NSF collaboration). As I understand it, this is on purpose.

The biggest concern is the sharing of documents and data. With the examples above, as people add custom fields to items, sharing them gets a lot more complicated.
With respect to your specific concern, when you have to people co-authoring in Zotero and one uses suppress author while the other uses two citation styles... not sure if this could be solved, but it certainly sounds messy.

The second concern is simplicity and usability. Right now, you can change the citation style of a document with one click. When the document contains several styles, you need to change each one individually and then things might not work well depending on the nature of the styles... doesn't sound great either. So essentially implementing such features would load up (overload?) the plugin and decrease the general ease of usage.

I'm aware that this is a trade-off. But my point is that while allowing users to customize things as they like may sound like an unambiguously good idea at first, it has substantial costs in terms of interface and interoperability. And I'd much rather have a few grumpy users that than a deteriorating product. As such, I think any such case needs a _really_ good reason to be implemented.
What constitutes a good reason is obviously a judgment call. I think the specific usage example you point to doesn't warrant substantial changes - it warrants convincing end-users to slightly change their behavior (afaik they most likely wouldn't even have to _change_ behavior, because the only bibl. software that offers a solution here is bibtex, and I'd assume that LaTeX users are familiar and comfortable with the idea of software imposed constraints).
(Incidentally, there is a imho more compelling usage case, as some styles in the sciences require different citation styles for figure and graph labels. Still, these are rather rare and the question of trade-offs remains).

Now, obviously people may disagree with the approach taken by Zotero on these questions (and people do!), but I don't think you're likely to change developers' minds about the fundamental approach.

Edit: wow that turned out long. See it as more general Sunday afternoon ruminations on "The Zotero approach to bibliographic management" ;-).

Thank you all for your comments. While I agree with the purist arguments (really I do) I still need to do something to fix the problem locally.

I have now had time to look at what's going on in the Word addin and have done enough "hacking" to convince myself that I can provide a solution which will work for my client (wife!) in her specific circumstances by changing the Addin code.

I still have to confirm that Word persists the relevant information into its document but, provided that it does, the problem seems to be solved,

So, I still have some way to go to prove the concept and to implement it. Should I be succesful in this (awful hacking) I'd be happy to collaborate with anyone else who has this specific problem.

Dan, what I'm planning will take relatively little time - would like to find out more about the 2.0 code though when the time comes!

Hi I know this is an old thread,

but this issue is driving my nuts, so if there were a VBA solution to add Author (Date) citations I would very much appreciate if you or someone shared a solution.
I somewhat understand the concerns, but then, e.g., in Lyx it works perfectly and I don't see exactly why in Word it should be different.

More importantly, I have a 100 page test or so with standard citations and it would take loooon to convert them all by hand and for the future an easy way to insert "Standard" Harvard citations would be awesome!!!