Zotero Standalone with Word Not Showing Citation Links

When I click on a citation in Word and click the Edit [Zotero] Citation icon in Word, the quick format window [red box] points to a previous "link" and not the current link. If I click on classic view, it indeed points to a previous, cached link.

If I exit Word (2011 for Mac) and Zotero (5.0.4) and start again, the first link I access works and then the problem reoccurs (the first link is shown for all subsequent links). I tried reinstalling the Word Zotero piece (from Zotero preferences), updating Zotero, checking database integrity, deleting and reinserting citations.

Any help appreciated.
  • Happens with 2 different Word documents, including one that used to work with the expected behavior.
  • Make sure you press Esc or Enter in the Zotero Quick-Format dialog. If you don't, the dialog is moved into the background, and when you press a button in the word add-in, it just pushes the dialog back to the front.
  • That does seem to work. Thank you for responding. However, when I hit ESC, the focus goes back to Word (from the Quick Format-Dialog) and then I have to click on the Zotero Edit Citation icon yet again. I don't remember this issue previously.
  • Pressing ESC will close the dialog without saving the changes you made to the citation, while pressing Enter will close the dialog and save those change. Either way, doing that will move the focus back to the Word document (as does closing the Classic dialog). If you want to edit the same citation again, you will have to press the Edit button again.

    If there is behaviour that's unexpected/unintuitive, we can work on improving it, but I believe it has not changed between Zotero 4.0 and 5.0
  • So I guess the solution is for me to remember to press ESC or ENTER after checking a citation. I don't remember it working this way before 5.0 but I could be wrong. I am copying text from different apps or from other Word docs and checking the citations, which may be a new workflow for me. I personally would expect the correct link to appear after I click on Edit Citation in Word no matter what was done previously. Thanks for all your help!
  • I believe it has always worked this way, but we're going to make some changes here so that clicking Edit Citation after moving the cursor elsewhere in the document behaves in a more predictable way.
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