Zotero & Lost Research Work

JakeBondo
I am running MacOS HighSierra, Word 15.36 and have been working on a research paper using the Zoreto Mac plugin, which is truly great. As I have been working on this paper, I closed Word and then went I went to reopen the file I got a "user does not have access privileges" and then click ok. My file then disappeared! I did everything I could to recover and nothing work. I had to restart my paper, and then again this morning it did the same thing. Thankfully I have saved several different copies across different media, and only lost one page of work this time.

Several times while I was working I noticed that Word was creating .tmp files at random and caused me to save as.

I know your not supposed to do important work in Beta software, but I thought I would give everyone a warning so this does not happen to you.
  • dstillman
    This doesn't sound like it's related to Zotero at all — it just sounds like a Word issue on High Sierra. The Zotero plugin only does anything when you click its toolbar buttons.
  • JakeBondo
    I have been working in other documents and I have had no problem. It is only with a research paper that is heavily footnoted with Zotero.

    I have gotten this error.
    https://cl.ly/ld6S

    And it seems to change the name of my document to a word work file:
    https://cl.ly/ldU1
  • bwiernik
    This really is a Word error. In my experience, Word 2016 on Mac is very buggy, particularly when using any of its advanced features (such as Fields, which Zotero uses, or Table of Contents, or Cross-references).
  • dstillman
    Right — Zotero inserts/updates regular Word fields into the document when you click its toolbar buttons. That's it. All other times you're simply using Word, and any problems you encounter are Word problems.
  • JakeBondo
    Regardless of Word error verse Zotero, this makes using Zotero with Word a major risk, therefore it is a Zotero problem. And people should be made aware of the incompatibility of the two.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited July 20, 2017
    @JakeBondo Many, many people use Zotero and Word on their Mac machines without any problem. Yes, Word for Mac is touchy but the problems you are encountering may be related to something else on your system. For many years I successfully used Zotero with LibreOffice (even though with each LO update I had to work to reconnect Zotero). Now my work provides Office 360 and I started testing Word. I've had no serious Word issues even with a lengthy document and many citations. (Macs at work and at home--but using the current Mac OS.)

    The High Sierra operating system is still in beta and Microsoft may not yet have properly tuned MacWord to work with this new OS.

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