See http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3233/#Item_20 and my second message down from there. It's some sort of VBA limit, not one of Zotero's, but I don't know what exactly it is.

We'll try to reproduce this and see what's going on here. We've finished completely rewritten Python-based versions of the OpenOffice and Mac Word plugins, which certainly avoid VBA issues like this, and we're doing some final testing of those. They may be ported to Word for Windows if issues like this prove too annoying to fix.

Me too... so to speak. I've just spent days converting my half finished thesis from EndNote to Zotero, and when I go to insert the bibliography (approximate 300 entries) I get the VB run-time error '6' message.

I was feeling pretty smug about the conversion until I got this error.

Unlike mastuff, I only have one document (not a maser/sub-document arrangement).

I'm using Office 2007, FireFox 3. There seem to be no errors in the database.

My conversion process is now stalled as I need to check my old bibilography against the (non-existant) new one (to see if I made any errors).

Would you like a copy of the file and the zotero database?

EDIT: I've sorted an actual proper fix underneath this, but that involves changing Zotero directly. If you're not happy with doing that (it's honestly not that hard!) then do this instead...

I've not got around to testing this yet, but I'm going to try the following (I'm 95% confident (!) it'll work...)

1. Finish document *completely* (this is not a dynamic work-around, i.e. should it work, the bibliography won't be able to be updated if citations are added / removed)
2. Copy half the document into a new document; generate bibliography
3. Copy bibliography into text editor, either Notepad or Write (probably Write as it'll preserve formatting)
4. Repeat with other half of document -- append the second half of the bibliography to the first half
5. Copy the whole bibliography back into an empty Word document, select it all and sort it (Table -> Sort)
6. Chuck it back into the thesis
7. Make a brew

I imagine that'll work, but it's a bit of a faff. I had a dodgy reference in there originally so had to do the whole, split-the-document-in-half-repeatedly-whilst-trying-to-generate-bibliography faff, to isolate that. It was literally one citation, and isolating the half without that citation allowed me to generate the bibliography. The text needs to be copied out of Word as otherwise Word will keep it as fields, which it won't sort, which isn't helpful.

This error is obviously being thrown by the VBA script, which I can't see, but it'd be good to know whether just changing the data type of whichever variable is responsible made a difference? Surely it can't be that tricky to change something from an integer to a double, or whatever?! Although, having read one of Dan's other posts he seemed to imply that it was a problem with the total length of the document, but that seems unlikely, unless the problem is that a string in the macro is being filled; strings have a size limit of 65,280 characters (see link below), but if that was exceeded I'm not sure it would throw an overflow error, more likely an 'out of string space'!

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q211489

Is there any way of viewing / changing the VBA code?

Hi,

I'm having a similar problem with the "run-time error '6'... overflow" message. Could someone explain what VBA is -- and what application to use to open the Zotero.dot file?

I tried to open this file (icon looks like a word document) but it is completely blank.

Is the fix described above by matstuff completely safe?

Thanks,
SR

Patching the code worked wonders for me. Thanks matstuff

Am having the same problem with Word adding refs slowly until I hit about 160 refs, then it started giving me the "run time error 6" error message. I tried the fix mentioned above to zotero.dot, but can't get past the modules branch. There is not zotero.bas that I can see to click on. Any other ideas?

mat,

I think its mTagStart and mTagEnd instead.

Great stuff, it worked for me too.

Cheers for the clarification guys. I've changed the instructions to reflect it. Glad it's working for you :)

Hi, please help me.

Windows XP. There is no zotero.dot file!!!!

I have in 2 weeks my thesis deadline!!!

I have the newest OOffice version and firefox/zotero too.
where I can fix this otherwise from integer to long??

thx in advance
ela

I have done the steps with "Alt+F11" and now I have another bad bug

see image
http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/3060/zoterooverflowafterchanbq2.gif


Update:

I changed all integers from subInsertFormattedText snd the calling subroutines to Long

1. error like above in the picture, but befor OO was broken and I have to restore the used files - bad
2. The bibliography is updated
3. the worst case is now a little bit smaller
4. changing Falso to True hadn't any effect
But here I cannot deal with that, any suggestion
update:
6. This happens only when the first new reference is inserted into my OOffice document.


cheers
ela

Hi,

the problem described above after the conversion procedures are gone!
As I restarted my machine two days ago I think this has cleaned all the caches from firefox and Openoffice (I remove all temporary files during logging of from windows) and now I don't observe any problem while inserting or updating anq citation. :)

Kinda funny that so few people have this problem.
A big thank you to Matstuff for coming up with this solution

Marc,

Bad luck! I wonder what Zotero is doing with such big numbers...? Anyway, keep on going, and try a data-type with more capacity than 'Long', namely 'Double'. Same solution, but use the word 'Double' in place of 'Integer' or 'Long'

('Long' will store up to 2,147,486,647, 'Double' will go to 1.79769313486232x10^308; basically, if you fill up a 'Double' I'll be dead impressed! Double's are there to store decimal information, but there's no reason they can't hold integers, so it *should* work!)

Good luck.

Mat

I just ran into this problem with word 2004, zotero 1.0.10 on osx 10.5.8. the fix suggested by matstuff worked fine - thx for that.

but I am wondering that this still persist in 1.0.10. any chance it will be fixed in 1.0.11?!

unfortunate as I (and a couple of colleagues) took office 2008 and zotero 2.0 for a testdrive and decided to stick with the older versions. its more stable imho and 2008 is so damm slow even after all the upgrades.

Hello and thank you everyone for these answers.

I am having the same problem and I must run the risk of having everybody scoff at me by asking: how and where exactly can I find Zotero.dot?

I don't know anything about Visual Basic but read about it and managed to get in, only it says the Zotero project is inaccessible.

Any help will be very much appreciated. Thank you very much!