Error Message Updating Document

Hi,

I am using Windows 10 Pro and Microsoft Word 365. Zotero has been great up until now. While putting in a citation, I got an error message "Zotero experienced an error updating your document." I went through the debugging procedure, saving a copy of my document and deleting sections of it, without finding the problematic citation. Nothing I did allowed me to add new citations. I opened a fresh document, and was able to copy the text across while putting in new citations. It let me continue with new work until I came to save it. I saved it to my Onedrive Account which switched on the automatic saving. The next citation I went to put in received an error message again. I can't access any other Zotero function within my document to try to change documentation style to see if that's the problem. I now have 3 identical versions because I saved a copy of the original then copied the text onto the other but all are unusable because Zotero keeps throwing error messages.


Hope you can shed light on what's happening.

Thanks
Jeanette
  • Have gotten a work around at the moment. Saved a test document to my desktop and disabled auto saving. It is allowing me to add citations after saving. I'll just have to do it the old fashioned way and remember to save my work!
  • edited May 23, 2019
    I went through the debugging procedure, saving a copy of my document and deleting sections of it, without finding the problematic citation. Nothing I did allowed me to add new citations.
    Did the problem still occur if you completely cleared the contents of the copied document?

    Having documents in OneDrive is known to cause problems with the plugin for some people, though we haven't been able to reproduce that ourselves. If you can reliably reproduce the problem with the document in OneDrive, we'd want to see a Debug ID from Zotero for an operation that triggers the error.
  • I experienced a similar problem of getting the error message, "Zotero experienced an error updating your document" when I try to add or refresh citation (I use Windows 10 and Microsoft Word 365).

    Then, I found a part of the document that is protected from edits (accidentally for some reason). If I try to edit that part, Word displays an error message, "You can't make this change because the selection is locked" on the Status Bar at the bottom of the window. After I deleted this protected part (couldn't edit it but could delete the whole part), Zotero started to work normally.

    I don't know if this works for other people but just for your information.
  • A correction to my previous posting. The error message from Word was "You can't make this change because the section is locked".
  • DeBug ID: D1833184879

    I get "Zotero experienced an error updating your document" when trying to refresh this document (which I have done many, many times in the past) in OneDrive. I saved it to my hard drive, changed nothing, and Zotero refreshed and updated it fine.
  • Does it start working if you restart your computer. How about if you name this document with a name that does not have any spaces in it (use "_" instead of " " if you need to). How about if you store it where the full path to the document does not have any spaces (including sub-folders)?
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