Issues after combining several Word documents

brettjb
edited September 6, 2022
I've been having some issues with Zotero since compiling several Word documents into a single document for a book. Citations are taking *very* long to insert (or fail to insert at all), and one of my group libraries appears to fail to load properly when I search for citations. This is one of the apparent errors I get in the debug output.
  • adamsmith
    Nah, deprecated function calls wouldn't be a problem. Generally not worth trying to parse the error or debug output yourself unless you know what you're looking for. Instead, submit the debug output & post the ID here.

    What operating system and Word version? How large (roughly how many citations) does that Word doc have? What sorts of delays are we talking about?
  • dstillman
    (I've renamed the thread to remove the irrelevant message. @brettjb, please always just report the actual problem you're facing and provide a Report ID — don't try to interpret debug output or post it here.)
  • brettjb
    OK thanks guys. Mac OS 12.5.1, Word v 16.64. I'm collaborating with two other people, who haven't reported problems. They are both on PCs. I've just tried to edit a citation, it's now 7 minutes and counting and still hasn't updated. Automatic citation update is disabled. When I try and insert a citation from the group library, it only finds a subset of the citations I know are there. 'Cited' items doesn't update in that view. 'My library' seems fine but I'm not using that for the book. I'm talking 1000s of citations over more than 300 pages.
    Debug ID D445553207 submitted.
  • adamsmith
    yeah, Zotero integration in Word for Mac is just significantly slower due to the APIs that MS Word offers in the Mac version -- I wouldn't expect it to be usable in that size document, honestly.
  • adomasven
    @brettjb Yeah, you have over 1700 citations in this document, and you're using a footnote/endnote citation style, which adds yet another level of slowness. To address individual issues:

    - 'Cited' items won't always appear/update for you if you have automatic updates disabled. Even with automatic updates enabled, when Zotero shows the citation dialog, it is still retrieving information from Word in the background to display the Cited section, and given the size of the document, it takes a while.
    - The size of the document should not affect which references you can find in the citation dialog. Confirm whether you cannot find items from your group library in a new document, where you won't experience slowness related to the size of this document. If you can find the items when inserting in a new document, but you can confirm that you do not find them when inserting in this existing document, we'll investigate. Create a new thread for that.
    - There's little we can suggest to improve the speed of citation processing. Mac Word unfortunately is just much slower on macOS. If you can get hold of a Windows computer, or even run Windows in a VM on this Mac, you will be able to update citations much faster. We generally recommend users working with big documents to split them up into chapters and work on them separately, only combining into the final document in the end. Otherwise switching to a citation style that does not use notes could improve speed somewhat, but given that you're collaborating and it's such a huge document, that may not be an easy option.
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