I tried Zotero 7 but I didn’t manage to let it play with Word. I reinstalled Zotero manually, deleted extensions.json, reinstalled the plugin, manually copied over Zotero.dotm, changed the languages of Zotero and Word to English, rebooted my computer: it still gives the same error, “Word could not communicate with Zotero. Please ensure that Zotero is open and try again”. The Word plugin also didn’t show up in Tools -> Add-ons.

Eventually I gave up, reinstalled Zotero 6 and it works fine again.

M1 MacBook Air, macOS 13.3.1, Word 16.73, Zotero 7 beta

Note that my database was originally a Jurism database which I now use with Zotero, so this might be a possible reason?

Yes, Report ID is 2006238858.

@DutchZoteroUser: OK, we got a report of this from someone else. It looks like Zotero 7 is failing to display this error dialog:

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/mac_word_permissions_missing

We'll fix the dialog, but this would happen if you declined to give it permission to control Word when prompted.

In the latest beta, we've fixed the error dialog for this problem, but there's still an issue with Zotero 7 not properly triggering the permissions prompt.

You should be able to work around this by installing the last Zotero 6 beta, triggering the permissions prompt with that, and then upgrading that to Zotero 7. Let us know if it works after that.

Release and beta builds have a different macOS bundle identifier, so the system treats them as separate apps, but if you trigger the prompt with the Zotero 6 beta that permission should carry over to the Zotero 7 beta.

This is now fixed in the latest Zotero 7 beta.