References disappearing in shared Word document

Support
1

Hi, I’m a paid user of Paperpile for many years. It works very well for Google Docs and I was happy when the Microsoft Word extension came out some years ago.

Recently, I have noticed a critical bug that needs to be addressed; it is significant enough to have me considering canceling my subscription and moving over to another application.

In shared Word Documents (e.g. I am opening .docx files that are stored in a shared Microsoft OneDrive using my local Microsoft Word), in-line citations as well as the corresponding bibliography randomly disappear. This is happening to me after having spent time putting in 50+ citations, only to see my bibliography reduce down to 8 randomly. My colleague has noticed a similar issue. This has caused significant lost time. Efforts to re-enter those citations in the appropriate places keep leading to random deletions. This does not happen with a Word doc that is just on my computer, not shared with other users.

Is there anyone on the Support team aware of this issue, and can we please track down this bug? Thanks.

2

Welcome to our forum, @wesleychang1463, and thanks for the report. I completely understand your frustration.

Unfortunately Paperpile doesn’t yet fully support editing citations in shared OneDrive/SharePoint documents. Our plug-in runs on the desktop app, and when files are stored in SharePoint/OneDrive, syncing conflicts can interfere with our citation fields and cause text to disappear unpredictably.

We’re actively looking into these issues, though I can’t promise a timeline yet. In the meantime, the most reliable workaround is to edit on a truly local copy of the document (not synced to OneDrive/SharePoint), then upload it manually when you’re done with citations.

We haven’t been able to reproduce this issue reliably on our end, so if you’re able to share a copy of the affected document (or a sample where you can reproduce it), that would be really helpful. You can send it to support@paperpile.com if you’d rather not share publicly.