Word 2016 Mac crashing
I'm not sure if this is related to Zotero, but I have Word 2016 and get spinning beach balls every 5-10 minutes, and a complete crash with loss of data every hour. If I update the references in a document, Word becomes similarly non-responsive for up to 1 - 2 minutes. Also, adding a new referenced results in ~20 seconds of non-responsiveness. Is this expected behavior?
"adding/updating references is practically instant" Do you have a multi-core i7? I'm using a Core m5 on the 2016 retina MacBook. This should have enough processing power as my (very old) XP era laptop worked very quickly with Zotero and Word 2010.
I don't know how to uninstall the Word add-in? I can't find any option to do so. When I go to into Templates and Add-ins, I see Zotero.dot there, but the minus sign to remove this is grayed out.
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/63666/word-2016-mac-crashing
I've been having problems with Zotero crashing Word on my mac for a long time. I've had this problem before with Word 2011, but after upgrading to Word 2016, the crash frequency has increased to a nearly unusable amount.
I'm not sure if there is a memory leak or what. However after using Word/Zotero on a document with ~ 50 references for about an hour, I start getting hangs in Word that last up to a minute. Eventually, Word (but not Zotero) goes to 100% CPU usage and has to be force quit. This force quit occurs about once every two hours resulting in data loss. This also happened on Word 2011, but only about once a day. I should note that this has happened on two separate computers MacBook Air and a 2016 Retina MacBook.
Unclear if this is related, but all of the autorecovery documents generated by Word when using Zotero are corrupted and can't be opened.
At this point, I'm considering moving to another reference manager, but I would prefer to keep using Zotero if possible. However, I feel stuck in a situation in which the Microsoft forums say stop using Zotero and Word will work fine, and this forum in which no one else seems to be experiencing my crashing issue.
Any help is appreciated. I really like Zotero an used it on the Windows OS for years without problems. Since switching to Mac, I've had numerous problems, making writing documents a really unpleasant challenge.
(Slowness when inserting/updating citations is another matter. That's never been speedy in Word for Mac, but what you're experiencing sounds way too slow for 50 citations.)
I wonder if you have some very large abstracts or other fields in your items? You could try disabling "Store references in Document" in the Zotero plugin's document preferences and click the Refresh button to see if that helps.
It's good to know that zotero isn't active outside of adding references. I will try changing the store references in document setting. Does it require that I remove all the references from the document to see an effect?
The abstracts are only the length allowed in Pubmed so I doubt there are very large field there.
I will see if deleting the add-in helps too. I just don't know why this would occur on two separate machines using two versions of Word: 2011 and 2016.
The Microsoft forums are of course implicating Zotero as the reason for the instability and they suggest not using the add-in. The challenge is that I have three grants due and all of my references are in Zotero.
I'd be willing to try uninstalling and reinstalling everything, but I've found that on macOS I can never remove all of an Office install.
I just noticed something. Do I need to save all documents as .doc and not .docx? I just noticed the language about .doc in the "Format using" settings. Could using a .docx default format be causing the problems I'm having?
For the "store references" -- have you tried unchecking it. I'm surprised it'd be greyed out ever. Is it for a new document?
Of note, last night I copied all the text from one of my documents that had the icon grayed out into a new document and saved that. This new document allowed unchecking of the icon.
Interestingly, I've been having a problem where Word auto-recovery files made with Zotero are all corrupted and can't be opened. This also happened with the newly copied document from above. However, when I changed the auto-recovered document to .doc, it opened correctly.
So I think I might be getting documents corrupted when moving between Word 2011 and 2016 and it may have something to do with Word compatibility mode.
I moved all the text from a corrupted document to a new word document and unchecked "store references". Additionally, I converted the document so that it no longer was in compatibility mode. Finally, I removed the bibliography that was inserted at the end of the document, which seems to massively increase the speed of adding a new reference.
I'll have to see if this process works with the other documents that were causing the crashes.
Thanks again for the suggestions.