Nasty section bug in Word

[Richard Tomkins]

OS X 10.4.9, PPC.
Office 2004 student

In word, create a blank document.

Ensure that page setup is correct for your printer.

Using =rand(), create about 8 or 10 pages of text.

Go to page 1 and about 2/3 of way down, insert a section break (odd page).

Go to print preview and notice that you get the first page, a blank page and
then the next page with text on an odd page. This is the expected behaviour.

Go to the second page and add a footer, separate it from the previous
section, start the page count at 1 and enter the page number. If the program
didn't hang or crash at this point, you're lucky. Sometimes you have to go
back to the first section and delete a footer there, sometimes not, this
process is futzy at best.

Now got back to print preview and notice that the blank page is now missing.

No matter what you do, you cannot get it back, and in the process of trying
to fix this many times the program hung, eating up 98 % of my CPU or crashed
once.

I have tried and tried and this is a not working properly, the blank poage
is lost forever and the page number also sometimes gets severly messed up
with the number refusing to start at 1 as I set it to.

FWIW, I am trying to do this at home on my Mac, but at work on a Windows Xp
with Office 2003, same friggin problem.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Richard:

I can't reproduce that here.

Would you mind repeating your test, this time, before entering the section
break, check to see whether the document is formatted for "New Section
starts on Next Page" (the default) or "Right Page"?

If Word thinks the first page is a Left page, then the blank page will
disappear.

The blank page will, of course, be visible only in Print Preview: I assume
you know that.

Cheers

OS X 10.4.9, PPC.
Office 2004 student

In word, create a blank document.

Ensure that page setup is correct for your printer.

Using =rand(), create about 8 or 10 pages of text.

Go to page 1 and about 2/3 of way down, insert a section break (odd page).

Go to print preview and notice that you get the first page, a blank page and
then the next page with text on an odd page. This is the expected behaviour.

Go to the second page and add a footer, separate it from the previous
section, start the page count at 1 and enter the page number. If the program
didn't hang or crash at this point, you're lucky. Sometimes you have to go
back to the first section and delete a footer there, sometimes not, this
process is futzy at best.

Now got back to print preview and notice that the blank page is now missing.

No matter what you do, you cannot get it back, and in the process of trying
to fix this many times the program hung, eating up 98 % of my CPU or crashed
once.

I have tried and tried and this is a not working properly, the blank poage
is lost forever and the page number also sometimes gets severly messed up
with the number refusing to start at 1 as I set it to.

FWIW, I am trying to do this at home on my Mac, but at work on a Windows Xp
with Office 2003, same friggin problem.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Richard Tomkins]

Aha!

To get the behaviour I wanted and expected I must set the document layout to
section start on new page or odd page and I also must select headers and
footers, different odd and even.

I was not doing that initially.

At first I had set up to start on odd pages and then went to modify the
footer, at which point everything went wrong.

I guess you could say that it is not a bug, just a usage problem.

Many thanks for suggesting an alternative approach.