Problems with Google Docs

rab.paterson
Usually I do a few demos of Zotero each semester at the universities where I teach. I finish with me opening Zotero again, highlighting lots of entries I have just imported and then just simply dragging and dropping them into a Google Doc with the audience seeing Zotero automatically alphabeticising and formatting the entries into the Google Doc. And nothing happened! The entries were not exporting into the G-doc and the G-doc was left with a blank page. This is the 2nd time this has happened in a demo recently as it happened at another university when I was demoing Zotero a couple of weeks ago. That uni does not even have Firefox installed. I needed to get special permission to get one room of computers installed with Firefox and again during the demo nothing happened - the entries were not put into G-docs. I presumed this was an installation problem with Firefox or something but this week so ignored it but the same thing happened this week in the room I have used many times last year without any problems. This was on Windows computers with Firefox 3.6 with a new download and installation of the latest Zotero straight from the Zotero page. I also recently got a new Macbook Pro, installed Firefox and Zotero on it yesterday and got the same result - no drag and drop into G-docs. Even my old PowerMac G5 no longer has a drag and drop with Zotero to G-docs. Any ideas as to what is going on here?
Drag and drop still seems to work in MS Word but as all of our students are using G-docs these days for easier peer reviews of written work, Zotero drag and drop for G-docs is a must. A short term work around is to use Zotero with Word and then upload the Word doc to G-docs but the formatting of the Word doc (not zotero refs) gets messed up that way. Any suggestions / help welcome.
  • dstillman
    edited September 4, 2010
    This was likely due to a change on Google Docs—the text area is probably no longer a real text area. (I believe other people have reported this, so I'm not sure this is a particularly new problem.)

    I don't know if there's anything we can do about that, but you can use the Quick Copy shortcut keys (C and A—see the Keys section of the Zotero preferences) instead—they're equivalent to dragging and work fine for me on Google Docs.
  • fbennett
    edited September 4, 2010
    Drag and drop works fine with Google Docs for me (Linux, Firefox 3.6.9, Zotero 2.0 dev xpi).

    It did fail on the first attempt after a clean install of Zotero, but only because the bibliography format under gear menu -> Preferences -> Export defaults to "Chicago Manual of Style (Note without Bibliography)". After resetting the style there to "Chicago Manual of Style (Full Note with Bibliography)", it works.

    Is it possible that the installation default style for quick copy has changed, and that people are just being tripped up by that?
  • dstillman
    edited September 4, 2010
    Maybe for some reason Linux is still getting an older version? Or maybe you don't have "Create new text documents using the latest version of the document editor." enabled in the Editing pane of the Google Docs preferences? (Or you might just be trying in an older document.)

    Safari's web inspector shows the editing box as a div, not a textarea.
  • dstillman
    And just to clarify, there's nothing Zotero-specific about this. As an example, try selecting text in the Firefox address bar and then dragging it to the google.com search field (or any standard text input field on any website). The text will be pasted. Then try dragging text from the address bar to a (new-version) document in Google Docs. It won't work.
  • fbennett
    edited September 4, 2010
    Right you are, I was trying in an older document. Can sadly confirm that drag and drop does not work in a freshly minted one, but that Ctl-Alt-C / Ctl-Alt-A still do.
  • rab.paterson
    Thanks for the comments. I had a quick look at the settings on my Preferences pane and the shortcut keys have a 'copy selected items citations to clipboard' or 'copy selected items to clipboard' with cmd+shift+A or cmd+shift+C but these copy into directly to my mac's clipboard not the g-docs I want them to go to. So the best solution I have so far is drag and drop to mac's text editor and copy from there into g-docs or the aforementioned Word drag and drop then copy into g-docs. Anyone got any other ideas or am I doing something wrong that I am missing?
  • dstillman
    rab: Those shortcuts copy to the clipboard, and then you paste into Google Docs. There's no need for another program in between.
  • rab.paterson
    Ah, I see - so basically keyboard shortcuts copy to the clipboard then copy and paste to g-docs. This is just about as many steps as drag and drop to text editor / word then copy to g-docs. I prefer mouse work and Mac Speech Dictate (being a crap typist) so almost never use keyboard shortcuts, so I thought the shortcuts worked with direct copying into g-docs - my mistake. Thanks for the clarifications.
  • adamsmith
    no - your misunderstanding "clipboard" - that's just the internal memory for text you copy.

    so you select the items in Zotero -->cmd+shift+c
    go to google docs
    and cmd+v pastes the bibliography.
    much easier than involving another program - I think that's what you mean with direct copying, no?
  • rab.paterson
    Got it now - I was a bit confused as the shortcut keys on the preferences pane (which I had never used before) didn't have a set for paste, only copy. So I assumed they were just to get the refs into the clipboard and then I had to open clipboard and copy and paste 'normally' using the edit menu. Just tried the method you mentioned above and it works great - many, many thanks!

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