Setup guide

Install Locus for Word

Word does not install add-ins from a website the way a browser installs an extension — you download a small file and point Word at it. It takes about two minutes, and you only do it once.

Discover

Connected literature for whatever you are drafting.

Evidence

Answers from “Ask this paper”, with the sentences behind them.

Cite

In-text citations and real Word footnotes, in your journal’s style.

Write

Claims in your draft that still need a source.

Before you start

  • A Locus account, signed in in this browser. The pane links to it the first time it opens.
  • Word 2016 or later, Microsoft 365, or Word on the web.
  • Permission to install add-ins. On a managed university or company laptop this is sometimes locked down by IT.

Step 1 — Download the manifest

A small XML file that tells Word where the pane lives. It carries no code and no personal data — it is generated for this site, so the copy you download here loads Locus from here.

Download locus-word-manifest.xml

Leave it in your Downloads folder — the next step looks for it there.

Step 2 — Point Word at it

Pick where you use Word. The three are genuinely different — Windows is the fiddliest, because Word insists the file be served from a shared folder.

  1. 1

    Copy the manifest into Word's add-in folder.

    Open Terminal and paste both lines. Word only looks for add-ins in this one folder.

    mkdir -p ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Documents/wef
cp "$(ls -t ~/Downloads/locus-word-manifest*.xml | head -1)" ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Documents/wef/locus-word-manifest.xml
  2. 2

    Quit Word completely — ⌘Q, not the red dot.

    Word reads that folder once at launch. Closing the window leaves it running, so the add-in will not appear until Word actually restarts.

    This is the single most common reason the install “did not work”. If you are unsure, right-click Word in the Dock — if you see Quit, it is still running.

  3. 3

    Reopen Word and click Locus on the Home tab.

    If it is not on the ribbon, use Insert → Add-ins → My Add-ins → Developer Add-ins → Locus.

Step 3 — Check it worked

Open the pane. Along the top you should see four tabs — Discover, Evidence, Cite, Write — and a project picker beneath them. Choose a project and the Discover tab fills with literature from it.

DiscoverEvidenceCiteWrite

Four tabs and a project picker means the install is good.

Seeing only three tabs? You are on a cached copy of an older build — the second entry in troubleshooting below fixes it.

When it does not work

The Locus button never appeared in Word.

Almost always Word was not fully quit. Closing the document window leaves Word running, and it only scans the add-in folder at launch. Press ⌘Q (Mac) or close it from the taskbar (Windows), then reopen.

If it still is not there, confirm the file actually landed:

ls ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Documents/wef

You should see locus-word-manifest.xml. An empty result means the copy command did not find your download — check what your browser named it.

The pane is blank, or shows an older version of Locus.

Word keeps its own browser cache for add-ins, and it does not expire on its own. After we ship an update you may keep seeing the old pane — a missing tab is the usual symptom. Quit Word first, or the cache is rewritten as you delete it:

osascript -e 'quit app "Microsoft Word"'
rm -rf ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Caches/*

Then reopen Word. On Windows, clear the Office cache at %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Wef. On the web, a hard refresh is enough.

The pane says I am signed out, but I am signed in to Locus.

The pane links to your account the first time it opens, using the session in your default browser. Open Locus in that browser, sign in, then close and reopen the pane. On Word for the web the pane runs cross-origin, so use the Open Locus to sign in button inside it rather than a separate tab.

“This add-in could not be started.”

The manifest points at a host Word cannot reach. This happens when the file was downloaded from a different deployment, or is an old copy from before a domain change. Delete it from the add-in folder, download a fresh one from this page, and install again — the download is generated per-site, so the copy you get here always points back here.

Windows: the add-in is not under Shared Folder.

Two usual causes. Either Show in Menu was left unticked when the catalog was added, or the path registered was a local path (C:\LocusAddin) rather than the shared network path (\\YOUR-PC\LocusAddin). Reopen Trust Center → Trusted Add-in Catalogs and check both.

Updating and removing

The pane loads from the web, so improvements to Locus reach you without reinstalling — reopen the pane, and clear Word's cache if it looks stale. You only need a new manifest if we change where the add-in lives, and we will say so if that happens.

To remove it: delete locus-word-manifest.xml from the add-in folder and restart Word. Nothing in your library changes, and any citations already in your document stay exactly as they are — they are ordinary Word text and footnotes, not live fields.

Still stuck?

Tell us which platform you are on and where the steps stopped matching what you saw, and we will get you running.

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