[View this page as PDF](/blog/2007/08/17/13-27-46.445348/100.pdf)
The Zotero team have released new Word and OpenOffice.org plugins for
[making citations and bibliographies in Word and
Writer](http://www.zotero.org/documentation/word_processor_integration).
First of all a few words about how these new plugins came about. See the
warning below about how you need to be cautious with the plugins.
The screenshot tells part of the story: Ian Laurenson did the work
funded by USQ via the [ICE project](http://ice.usq.edu.au/). What that
doesn't tell you is how many extra hours Ian put in to get it working,
or the struggle he went through to work with another contributor who was
making changes in parallel, without much management or direction from
the Zotero team.
We hired Ian to work on a couple of things – one was to port the original Zotero Word
plugin to work with Writer. Ian had a better idea, though. Since both
apps use variations of Basic, he was able to write one bit of code that
works in both, with 'compiler directives' for the different bits. This
should significantly reduce the maintenance overhead.
If you want to share documents between Word and OpenOffice.org be sure
to select the option to store citations using bookmarks in the document
preferences.
Here's a demo done by Daniel de Byl. (He's a bit shy, still at doing
these screencasts, so he doesn't talk but you'll see him add citations
to an OpenOffice.org writer document and make a bibliography then
convert it to Word using ICE, then continue working on it in Word. )
[http://ice.usq.edu.au/media/videos/zotero\_demo\_01.swf](http://ice.usq.edu.au/media/videos/zotero_demo_01.swf?embed&height=480&width=640%20)
Take that EndNote!
**Warning:** **** The current version uses citation identifiers which
are local to your Zotero database. If you add citations to a doc then
give it to someone else you need to give them your Zotero database as
well. This is a limitation with EndNote as well, by the way. Hope it's
fixed soon.