Hi Roberto:
I am starting to think that what you are seeing is at least partly normal
operation in Word.
Word normally takes some "time" to finish its housekeeping and display the
document paginated the way it's going to print. How long it takes depends
on the document, but it can be several minutes.
To eliminate the possibility that you have a "slow document", please reveal
your paragraph marks and then copy everything EXCEPT the last paragraph
mark. Create a blank document and paste into that. Save under a different
name. This will clean out any garbage that can collect in a Word document
after editing. It is sometimes possible to get several megabytes of random
trash trapped in a Word document. If you do, pagination of the documents
becomes very slow and you tend to get the problems you have described.
Pagination is a background task in the latest versions of Word; it runs all
the time and completes its tasks when you're not typing anything.
When you describe your document as "tightly formatted" I suspect you mean
that you have carefully arranged to text so that each page ends exactly as
you wish. We normally strongly recommend that Word users do not do this,
because it leads to documents changing, sometimes substantially, each time
they get a minor edit.
Instead we recommend that you paginate your documents using style properties
and paragraph properties to cause the page breaks to fall at logical breaks.
This results in a document that is impervious to pagination changes caused
by editing, buy changing printers, fonts, or computers.
You didn't answer Daiya's question about Automatically Update. Please check
Tools>Templates and Addins>Attach to see if the "Automatically update styles
on open" setting is checked in that document. If it is, that would
adequately explain the problem you are observing. Turn it off
Also check your styles: go to Format>Style>Modify and ensure that
"Automatically update" is NOT checked on any of the styles you are using in
the document. If it is, that would explain what you are seeing.
Do you have a Font Manager installed? If you have a font manager that
dynamically enables and disables fonts on your computer, that would explain
the problem.
How is your printer connected? Word draws all of its critical measurements
from the default printer. If the default printer changes, all of your
metrics change and the paginations changes on a long document are
substantial.
I actually do not think there is much wrong with Word on your computer, but
I am getting a bit suspicious about that document.
Hope this helps
Thank you, Beth and Dalya, for your replies!
No automatic updating. Yes the line breaks print that way, as well.
Let me further explain: when these problems occur (the line break issue
is the most obvious, to me, as most of my documents are tightly
formatted, so line break changes produce number of page changes), I can
usually "fix" them simply by quitting Word and then restarting.
Sometimes it takes several tries, but literally clicking on the same
document, which opens Word, produces slightly different results on
screen (I always work in Page Layout) and in print... either the way I
expect it to be or slightly longer, due to a few line break changes.
Yesterday/last night, even restarting my Mac didn't help, nor did all
of the other things I tried. What did *seem to* help was deleting yet
another preference file: the com.microsoft.Word.plist located in my
User/Library/Preferences folder, not the one/stuff in the
User/Library/Preferences/Microsoft folder (such as
com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist). But I don't know for sure, since the
problem is intermittent anyway.
The change in line breaks isn't huge... I'm talking a word here or
there, or what might be hyphenated one time isn't the next... very,
very small fluctuations in the layout that cumulatively produce a
bigger change.
Regarding the "Page Y of Y" problem, that, too, is usually solved by
quitting Word and restarting.
Weird, huh? And I've experienced this stuff only in Office 2004.
Thankfully, it's relatively rare, but it is profoundly annoying.
--Roberto
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John McGhie <
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Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
