Citations get mixed up, when adding multiple citations to one word table cell

Hi everyone,
first and foremost, I would like to thank you for putting in the effort to provide such a cool tool like Zotero.
Unfortunately, I am experiencing difficulties when trying to add multiple citations to one cell of a word table. My reference ID is as follows: 2002730922.

Complete description of the issue:
1. Open any word document.
2. Add a table to the word document.
3. Enter some information into a single cell of the table and try to add a citation behind the information.
4. Add some more information to the cell and add another Citation.
5. Your cell should look for example like this: "500 mm [2], 600 mm [3], 750 mm [4]"
6. You'll notice, that when you add the second citation, difficulties arise. Instead of getting to a new citation, the first one is changed and instead a timestamp is added. For example: "500 mm [2], 600 mm [3], 750 mm 3/27/23 1:13:00 PM"

Current workaround:
- Manually adding the old citations back into the cell. This sometimes works. Unfortunately, this can be really bothersome as I am working with loads of sources and I tend to forget out of which paper the information came, so I need to spend some time searching for it again...

Thanks for your help!

Best,
Carl
  • Yeah, that's a quirk (arguably a bug) of how Word handles fields in Table cells. I don't think there's anything Zotero can do about that, I'm afraid.
  • Damn, that really is a pity... I would love to aggregate the data of multiple sources in one table for overview purposes. But I do not want to lose the connection to the sources in Zotero...
    Do you know, whether it would it be a suitable workaround to use LibreOffice? Or is there any way to integrate Zotero with Excel?
  • I'm not sure about LibreOffice -- tables are generally tricky, but it's worth a try. My recollection is that references in tables in LO are sorted at the end of the document -- if that's not a concern, this might work.
    Definitely no for Excel (or any other spreadsheet tool)
  • Alright, I'll have a shot at LibreOffice then. Thanks for your help!
  • Hi, same problem here. Is there really no solution coming up? This is something that I need to be able to do on regular occasions. So far my workaround would be to set up the combined references outside of the table and then copy it into the table. But I am not sure this is stable (updating refs...?) and it is certainly cumbersome...

    Is there a feature request page somewhere for Zotero?
  • Feature requests are any posts in the forum, but this has little to do with Zotero: as I say above, it's how Word handles fields in tables.
  • edited February 24, 2024
    Citations within tables are problematic in each word processor I've used (MS Word, Libre Office, Google Docs). This problem exists whether using Zotero or similar software (EndNote, Mendeley).

    The problem is that the character-length of the zotero field that contains the citation text will be different from the citation text itself. Thus, the word processor cannot calculate the necessary cell spacing. (Admittedly this is an oversimplification.) And that is only one of the problem issues.

    MS Word's own system of reference citation fails when applied within tables.
  • edited February 24, 2024
    @adamsmith Is there other (perhaps, LaTeX) software that allows (even numeric-style) citations in tables? I gather from your other posts that you use other document preparation software.

    Several Many years ago we handled this by importing a finished Word document into PageMaker and hand-editing the table and bibliography. With the Vancouver style we used, this required renumbering all of the references! The result was a beautiful document but getting there was very tedious.
  • I think LaTeX and even pandoc with markdown should work just fine, but I haven't tested
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