Re-inventing the wheel
Over on Study Hacks there is an article on How to Build a Paper Research Database. The article describes:
This is how you win a Pulitzer Prize. Imagine, then, what this technique would do for an undergraduate research paper or your senior honors thesis. In this article, I'm going to teach you how to build a simplified Branch-style Paper Research Database using Microsoft Excel. I'll tell you how to format it, populate it, and use it to structure your writing.
It seems to me that just by using Zotero would do much (if not all) of what the article recommends. Not only that, Zotero would do it more easily and quickly.