Urgent problem with zotero and word mac

evanbowness
Hello! my Zotero and Word are not communicating - I cannot edit citations or refresh the bibliography.

It's not giving me an error, it just isn't working.

Whenever i try to use the word zotero plug in, my window changes to the Zotero application and nothing happens.

please help!

Report error: 1198699993
  • evanbowness
    I saw there was a sync related issue, which I reported:
    966643261
  • enozkan
    edited September 9, 2023
    Did you look for the add/edit citation dialog? It is part of the Zotero app and it may be hiding behind the Zotero window. I would look through all open windows.

    In a couple of times when this happened to me (and it was not a hiding citation dialog), restarting Word and Zotero helped me.
  • evanbowness
    thank you for that! It wasn't opening the dialogue (it's not hidden). Now it has started to initiate the dialogue, but it freezes when I try to exit it. Definitely is a bug...
  • adamsmith
    Does this happen in a new document or only a specific one? If the latter, how big is that?
  • evanbowness
    thank you Adamsmith! It does also happen in a new document - this problem seems to be a Zotero or Word plugin problem on my system
  • evanbowness
    I have tried:

    closing word; closing Zotero
    restarting my macbook
    re-installing word (office 365)
    reinstalling the word Zotero plug-in (it does it very fast and then requests word be restarted)
    reinstalling Zotero
  • evanbowness
    periodically i can get the add/edit citation dialogue box to open, but then it freezes when i try to close the dialogue box... sigh
  • evanbowness
    I've learned that after a very long time I get a notification that "Zotero had a problem updating my document" or something like that. It doesn't freeze.
  • evanbowness
    I caputred the error - report #:
    1318524230
  • evanbowness
    Many errors today - Report Log: 1632799723
    I did get it to work at one point by accident. but I'm back to no longer being able to add/edit citations or refresh the biblography.
    it does seem to be specific to this document now.
  • adamsmith
    In a big document, Zotero with Word for Mac is just quite slow, so you'd see what looks like freezing for typical operations and that wouldn't be particularly surprising.
    Someone else would need to look at the error reports to see if there's more to that -- but if you're looking at a document with >100 pages and a comensurate number of citations, you're likely just seeing standard slowness. In that case, other than waiting really long, splitting the document up is really the only current solution.
  • evanbowness
    shoot. yah it's not that big of a document - it's about 30 pages with about 70 references. it was working fine until something glitched yesterday.

    how do you split up a document with one reference list?
  • adamsmith
    No, that shouldn't be an issue then. 30 page/70 citations should be a non-issue even on Mac Word. Could you instead a a report ID provide a debug ID for a process that looks like it freezes or doesn't work?
    https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output
  • evanbowness
    i'll do that right now
  • evanbowness
    here's one from today (but i left it on for a while so it might not be that helpful) - but i'll do it again.
    i turned it off imediately after it crashed:
    D1345417967
  • evanbowness
    i figured it out! toggling the fieldcodes revealed a hundreds of placeholder 'insert zotero citation' fields. i'm not sure how it happened, but i was glad to find the problem.
    Works fine now - thanks for your help!
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