Cannot add/edit reference in large Word Document (>500 pages)
Hi,
I run the standalone Zotero version 5.0.34 with Microsoft Word for Mac 2011. Everything works fine with documents containing fewer pages. But I am absolutely unable to add a new reference or edit an old reference into a document with over 500 pages. Upon choosing a reference to add/edit and pressing the enter key, the "update bar" appears and thereafter never leaves the screen and nothing further happens.
Please help! My book deadline is tomorrow!
Thanks!
I run the standalone Zotero version 5.0.34 with Microsoft Word for Mac 2011. Everything works fine with documents containing fewer pages. But I am absolutely unable to add a new reference or edit an old reference into a document with over 500 pages. Upon choosing a reference to add/edit and pressing the enter key, the "update bar" appears and thereafter never leaves the screen and nothing further happens.
Please help! My book deadline is tomorrow!
Thanks!
*phew!*
I'm curious, though: for the 500-page document, had you used Zotero before, or was this the first time you were inserting Zotero citations into it? This new feature currently doesn't provide the option to disable automatic updates until after the first insertion that takes more than 5 seconds, so if it was just the size of the document itself that caused this to be so slow for you, we might want to reconsider that approach (though it seems like it would be somewhat unusual to just begin using Zotero on such a large document).
The book is divided into 12 chapters so I wrote (and referenced) the chapters in separate files. When the time came to merge each chapter into one large file, I did this slowly and cautiously expecting things to go wrong on the referencing front. Only it didn't for most part. It was only when I was merging the 9th chapter that I started to notice a slowing with the addition of each further chapter. And now that they are all merged into one document, even a simple adding of a suffix or prefix to one in citation reference takes hours to update. The Zotero beta feature that you mention would be a good way to tackle this particular point.
1. In the Help menu, go to Debug Output Logging and select Enable.
2. Attempt to insert the bibliography in word.
3. Wait for the process to halt with an error. Do not touch Zotero or Word over this time.
4. Return to Zotero Help → Debug Output Logging and click Submit Output, which will disable logging and submit the output to zotero.org. A window should pop up containing a Debug ID. Click “Copy to Clipboard” and paste the Debug ID into this forum thread.
What eventually fixed it was finding a corrupted citation. One citation would occasionally provoke a pop up indicating I had edited it and asking whether to keep or remove changes. I hadn't edited the citation in the document but had changed one of the author names in my Zotero database. After this happening several times (but not every time), I suspected it might be the issue. I tried removing that sentence and with some time, the bibliography eventually populated. I then re inserted the sentence with a freshly created citation from a blank document, updated and was able to get it to work.