Wors 2008 puglin slow/unuseable in large documents

hmarquis
The word 2008 plugin is so slow as to be unusable. Word 2008, Mac OSX, document 200 pages (no citations) takes as long as 20 seconds to insert citation (to view popup Zotero window.) With a small document popup display is almost instant. Through experimentation is seems that as document size increases time to display popup also increases. Note that number of citations (none or many) does not seem to affect this problem. Problem is simply size of Word document.
  • asplundj
    This is also true on Word 2007 in WinXP
  • hmarquis
    I think the plugin is loading the entire document somehow. I haven't had time to study the code too much, but it must be scanning the entire document and/or loading the entire document. Would be nice if one of the developers or administrators here took interest in this topic.
  • Simon
    edited March 5, 2009
    The plug-in is not loading the entire document. Microsoft's public APIs, which are only method of interacting with Word, are just slow. On Mac, this API is implemented through AppleScript, and is, I would assume, much slower than on Windows (although I haven't tested this). In the Project Gutenberg e-text of War and Peace, which is approximately 500,000 words, retrieving single field via AppleScript takes 3 seconds on my system. I suspect that Microsoft's underlying implementation of this call is scanning the entire document for fields and finding one with the appropriate index (since true field objects appear not to exist in AppleScript). Unfortunately, this is beyond our control, because it is our only way of accessing fields. In my testing, plug-in execution time is a function of both document length and the number of citations, but adding the first citation still takes around 15 seconds.

    While it is going to be impossible to speed things up significantly while maintaining current plug-in functionality, we have discussed creating an alternative mode of Word integration intended primarily for dealing with documents of this size. This mode would not necessarily show citations as they would look in the final document until a final (time-consuming) formatting stage, but would speed things up considerably in cases like yours. For now, you are advised to split your document into chunks, and then combine these chunks before formatting the final bibliography.
  • ezingess1377
    The plug-in was working very well for me originally but now I am having the same kind of slowness, and my document is only six pages long! This is hardly of a size where one could split into chunks... Any other suggestions?
  • dstillman
    ezingess1377: How many citations do you have in your document? How many items do you have in your Zotero library (if you select all and look in the right pane)?
  • ezingess1377
    Roughly 30 citations, 701 items in my library.

    May I suggest that in the next version of the plug-in you develop some kind of feature that keeps track of which sources you have cited most recently? It's a little tedious to have to search for the item in the library each time, or to go digging through folders.
  • turkeyphant
    I have the same problems. I'm only running it on a 1.6 Ghz netbook, but it's still slower than I'd expect even in relatively small documents with few citations and a few hundred references in the Zotero database.
  • d.n.milne
    Hi there,

    I am having the same issues on a 2.26 GHz Dual core MacBook, with OSX and Word 2008. I was hoping that the combination of Zotero and Word would solve my thesis woes, but it really is unbearably slow to add citations; a complete deal-breaker.
  • Florentina
    Hi, everyone!

    I've noticed that if I insert citations without adding a reference list at the end, it works very fast. When I've got a big reference list at the end and I add a citation that's already there it works fine, but with a new entry it takes ages to include the citation and update the list.

    Has anybody tried working with a big document with citations only, without a reference list, which can be added when the document is finished? I'm considering doing this, as it seems to work well, but was wondering whether I might run into some other problems.

    Thank you.
  • Bionatsci
    Has anybody tried working with a big document with citations only, without a reference list, which can be added when the document is finished? I'm considering doing this, as it seems to work well, but was wondering whether I might run into some other problems.
    I don't think this should cause any problems, and in fact it's how I work all the time, although the largest document I have written with Zotero is 5000 words. If I need to have a look at a full bibliography entry for any reason I just add a bibliography temporarily and then delete it again. I think the reason I started working this way was the speed of adding citations, as you describe (I am also rather fond of just pressing a button and having a beautifully formatted bibliography magically appear).
  • Florentina
    Thanks for this, Bionatsci! Fingers crossed!

    P.S. Ha-ha! I feel the same about the bibliography magic.
  • Florentina
    'Run-time error 91' screen of death... (Discussed elsewhere, with no solution for me.)

    I wonder if there's any connection.
  • sean
    Florentina: What version of Zotero and Word plugin are you using?
  • Florentina
    Zotero 1.0, Sean. Not sure about the plugin.

    Do you think it might help if I upgrade?
  • sean
    Yes. We're no longer doing any active development on 1.0, so nothing's going to be fixed there. Moreover, the entire plugin architecture was rewritten for 2.0, and performance is generally much better.
  • Florentina
    I've upgraded and it works now. I'd been afraid to do it because I was working with a large document and I didn't dare take any unnecessary risks. But everything seems fine at the moment.

    I'll post a message in the 'run-time error 91' thread.

    Thank you very much. Sean!
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