Problem
If you’ve noticed that Word seems to react more slowly when working with Citavi’s Word Add-In, it could be due to one of the following reasons:
Possible Causes
Microsoft Word
Word becoming unresponsive and suffering from slow performance are common issues that may be unrelated to Citavi. Here are some fixes and workarounds:
- Disable "AutoSave" if using OneDrive
If you save your Word file in OneDrive, the AutoSave feature can make it seem like Word is no longer responding each time the document is saved. Disable this feature and save changes manually instead, for example, by pressing Ctrl+S. - Disable hardware acceleration on slower computers.
Office 2013 has a built-in option for hardware acceleration that can cause problems on slower computers. Try disabling the feature in Word's Options (screenshot). After that, exit and restart Word. It can also help to disable the feature and then enable it again after restarting Word. - Disable background repagination
Word recalculates page numbering whenever you insert something in your document. If you have a long document with a lot of footnotes, this process can slow Word down considerably. It can help to disable this option while writing (screenshot). To disable the option, on the View tab, temporarily switch to Draft mode. Then, open the Word Options and click Advanced. Under General, clear the Enable background repagination checkbox. - Install missing Office updates.
Installing the latest updates to Office may solve any outstanding issues. Make sure you are running the latest, updated version of Office by clicking Update & security, and then Windows Update. Alternatively, in Word 2016 you will also find an update option under File > Account > Update Options > Update Now. - Change your high resolution monitor's compatibility settings
If you're working with more than one monitor and one of the monitors has a very high resolution, you might notice that the display jumps around. Change the compatibility setting in Word, by clicking File > Options > General and then selecting Optimize for compatibility (see screenshot and this Microsoft FAQ article).
Complex Citation Styles
The speed with which Word processes operations related to Citavis Word Add-In may depend on a number of factors:
- Hardware: CPU, RAM
- Software: other background processes, other add-ins
- Word: embedded objects (for example Excel files), document length
- Citavi: citation styles that include cross-references, mistakes in user-created styles
Some footnote citation styles carry out complicated calculations with every new reference added.
These calculations are necessary in the following cases:
- checking whether a title has been cited before (ibid., see footnote x)
- checking whether there is more than one publication by a single author (idem)
- when a citation style script suppresses specific reference types in the bibliography
Citavi’s Word Add-In features three ways to reduce the amount of operations processed:
- Temporarily disabling automatic citation style formatting (screenshot).
- Temporarily disabling the bibliography (screenshot).
- Temporarily switching to a different footnote style (for example, British Journal of Public Science), and then reverting back to the original style once your writing is close to being finished.