Cannot connect Zotero to Microsoft Word

anvnva
I cannot properly connect my Zotero app to Word on my Mac. I have the Zotero tab in Word, however, whenever I try to do any of the actions, like adding a citation, a windows saying "Word could not communicate with Zotero. Please ensure that Zotero is open and try again" pops up. At the same time, the Preferences>Cite>Word Processors tab in Zotero app does not have anything apart from the "Use classic Add Citation dialog" button. Everything was working properly before, but I had an issue with the Safari Connector, so I re-installed Zotero and I've had the Word issue since.
I have tried restarting my laptop, re-installing Zotero multiple times, following the steps on the "Manually Installing the Zotero Word Processor Plugin" page, but nothing seems to work.
I would be extremely grateful if someone could provide a solution to my issue. Thank you in advance!
  • dstillman
    Make sure you're running the latest version of Zotero via Help → Check for Updates. An issue that could cause that communication error (if you tried to open Zotero from a disk image instead of from Applications) was fixed in 5.0.85.
  • anvnva
    I have the latest version of Zotero. I actually think that both the Safari connector issue and this Word one started after I updated Zotero.
  • dstillman
    Can you provide a Report ID?
  • anvnva
    1079367073
  • dstillman
    (Note that you're using the Zotero beta, presumably to use the test version of the Safari extension. That's fine, but it's very important to say that when reporting a problem, since otherwise we'll assume you're using the release version.)

    Can you open your Zotero profile directory and send extensions.json to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread? You can then delete that file and restart Zotero, which might fix this.
  • anvnva
    Apologies for not mentioning that my version is beta.
    I will try doing that now. Thank you for your help!
  • dstillman
    edited April 2, 2020
    Thanks for sending the file. It looks like you might have a problem due to having had multiple copies of Zotero in Applications, possibly paired with having previously run Zotero from the disk image. It's looking for the extensions within "/Applications/Zotero 2", but if you no longer have a copy of the app with that name, the extensions wouldn't work.

    In any case, if you delete extensions.json and restart Zotero from the "Zotero" copy the first time after that, it should work.
  • anvnva
    I deleted both version of extensions.json and now everything works perfectly fine. Thanks again for your time and assistance!
  • dstillman
    Note that only one of those was from Zotero, in the directory listed on the linked page. The other was from Firefox, so if you had Firefox extensions installed you may need to reinstall them. You should always follow documentation for finding files in specific locations rather than relying on a system-wide search and just looking for files with the same name (which I’m guessing is what you did here).

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