Keyboard shortcut for Insert Citation

Hey everyone,

I know that drag&drop is probably not yet possible as a means of inserting a certain citation into your Word 2007 document, but I was wondering if there is a quicker way to do this other than using the Insert Citation button in Word's Add-ins tab. Is there a keyboard shortcut for this? I know in EndNote, for example, you could use Ctrl+2 to insert a selected citation into your document at the current position of the cursor.

Among the keyboard shortcuts in Zotero's Preferences I could not find any relating to citations, only general program shortcuts...

Many thanks for any replies!
  • I've searched the Zotero documentation & forums some more and still could not find an answer to my question. Any help would be much appreciated.
  • OK, not sure how much help this will be as it's for OpenOffice but I imagine something similar will be the case for Word.
    You need to modify a keyboard shortcut for your wordprocessor. In openoffice you do this by going to:
    Tools / Customize / Keyboard

    then you have to select the right Category
    OpenOffice.org Macros / user / Standard / Zotero

    then you highlight ZoteroAddCitation and give it a new shortcut key

    Hope that helps.

    For anybody else reading: is it worth adding something about this to the FAQ documentation?
  • edited March 17, 2011
    Thanks Jon! IMO it *is* worth mentioning this in the FAQ :) Also, in the long run (future versions), it would be great if this shortcut were more readily available for configuration, for example in Preferences|Shortcut Keys
  • Trouble with your last suggestion is that people (well, me at least) do tend to muck about with their WP shortcuts - and I'm not sure how happy I'd be about some third party program (even Zotero!) changing them - particularly when it's not that difficult to set them from whichever WP you happen to be using (hopefully you've now figured out how to do it in Word).
    Maybe you could call up the OO or Word dialog box from Zotero preferences to avoid conflicts (is that what Endnote does?). Which would be neat but hardly a huge priority unless very easy.
  • Hi Jon. I see what you mean about configuring the shortcuts.

    Unfortunately, I was not able to do it in Word. Looking at the actions that you can set a keyboard shortcut for, there is none that resembles ZoteroAddCitation, or AddCitation, or any action that even contains the word Zotero. There is an InsertCitation action, but after assigning it a shortcut, nothing happens when that shortcut is pressed, so I assume it's just a Word action unrelated to Zotero.

    I guess I'll just insert them by hand for now (go to the Add-ins tab and choose Add CItation), but I'm really hoping that future versions will somehow allow this very simple yet useful feature, for example by adding an action in Word (ZoteroAddCitation!) that you can set a keyboard shortcut for.
  • (go to the Add-ins tab and choose Add CItation)
    I don't know the new version of Word very well, but you can probably grab the Zotero buttons and tear them off the ribbon into a floating toolbar, so you don't have to go to a special ribbon each time. I could see this being a big drawback of the new Word-- but I don't regularly use it, so I haven't tried to address the issue.
  • Keyboard shortcuts are possible in word 2007 (I've been using them for months), they're just not in a very intuitive location. See the instructions here:

    http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/keyboard_shortcuts_in_word_plugin
  • @Bionatsci: exactly what I was looking for, many thanks for this!
  • @Bionatsci -- Thank for very much! I was looking for this for a short time and it is exactly what I needed!
  • Thanks Jon, this was very helpfull.
  • Thank you!!
  • It's Control + Alt + A.

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