Word 2016 Mac plugin very slow

ambstuc
edited January 20, 2019
I am using Zotero 5.0.60, Word 2016 16.16.6.

The plugin is incredibly slow. It takes a good 20-30 seconds to update any citation, and to insert/refresh the bibliography takes even longer! The thesis is 85000 words, 303 pages, with a good 200 citations. This is hardly usable! Installed Word 2007 under Parallels Desktop 14.0.1, and it is much faster- still takes about 5-10 seconds inserting citations but much better. Is this an issue with the Mac version, any idea how I can speed things up? Many thanks.
  • djross3
    Work in another document, copy and paste into the main document. I have the same setup, and this works well.

    When you're done and ready to generate the final document, you'll need to refresh the main document, and that may take several hours. But you can do that while you sleep, if necessary.

    Longer discussion here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/74757/extremesly-slow-response-from-the-edit-citation-feature-of-the-word-plugin-for-mac
  • bwiernik
    edited January 21, 2019
    The simplest method can also be to disable automatic citation updating in the Document Preferences window in the Zotero tab.

    Unfortunately, the technical method Zotero needs to use to connect to Word on Mac does slow down much more than the corresponding method on Windows.
  • djross3
    Disabling updating does help (minutes vs. hours to insert a citation), but by 300 pages and a few hundred citations it will be slow anyway, so working in a second document will be much faster. I haven't had many problems writing a normal length paper (say, 10,000 words), but once it reaches 100+ pages it's worth working in a parallel window for inserting citations.
    Of course if you haven't yet tried disabling citations, do that first.
  • ambstuc
    Update:
    Thank you for all your comments. In the end I used Word 2007 under Windows, where every runs much faster - only 1-2 seconds to update fields etc. After repeated searches, it appears that the Mac Office API is a lot slower, and nobody so far has been able to figure out why. This seems to be affecting both Word 2016 as well as Office 365.
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