Oooohhhh.... Oooohhhhh.... Mine!!! Mine!! I got it
Many thanks for this question: really brightened up my afternoon.
This is one of the more complex requirements you hit in technical writing.
There are several ways we do this, so let me understand your requirement a
bit better: You want to print the whole Policy Manual, page "1" to page
"last", and on each page you need the current page number within the entire
manual to appear. Do you also want the page number within the individual
policy to appear? E.g. "Policy Manual, Page 343 of 1034, Acceptable User
Policy, Page 12 of 18"
What I am getting at is: do you want a single print job with two numbers on
each page; or multiple print jobs, one showing the page number within the
entire manual, the other showing just the page number of the individual
policy?
Let's assume you need only one set of page numbers. OK, the simplest way to
do this is usually to use "Folio by Chapter". This function is built-in to
Word.
1) Ensure that each Policy contains a paragraph styled with the built-in
Heading 1 style on the first page. It does not have to be visible: you can
hide the paragraph, but most people use Heading 1 for the Title, problem
solved.
2) Ensure that the Heading styles are numbered using the Linked Style
method: see
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/ and read Shauna's " Numbering,
Bullets, Headings, Outlines" section.
3) In Word, reveal your Footer and use Insert>Page Number and check the
"Include Chapter Number" box. See Word Help Topic " Include chapter numbers
along with page numbers".
There, that's the conventional way of doing it, and it's purpose built for
your requirement.
This manual will end up at around a thousand pages. Word will easily handle
a single document of that length, and that's the easiest way to get this
printout to happen without a whole lot of "issues". You create a single
blank document, give it a name and save it.
Then use Word's Insert>File command to insert each of the policy documents
into it, one after another. Obviously you will wait until each one is
finished and signed off before you do this, because a document of this size
handles very slowly unless you have a supercomputer on your desktop. If you
are going to do a lot of this, you need a Dual G5 with two gigs of RAM and a
fast SCSI hard drive
As you insert each document, it's "Chapter Number" will update, and so will
its page numbers.
Insert a TOC at the front and an Index at the back, Select All, Update
Fields, and Print. You're done...
OTHER WAYS
There are several other ways you can do this:
* If you need both sets of page numbers to appear in a single print job,
you need to use a "computed" page number.
You insert a bookmark at the beginning of each Policy. If you need the
number of pages of an individual document, you need a second bookmark at the
end of it. Then in your footer you use a Formula field to compute the
difference. The bookmark in the following example is named "AcceptUse"
For example, Policy Manual page {PAGE}, Acceptable Use Policy page
{={PAGE}-{PAGEREF AcceptUse}} will insert the overall page number, then the
page number within the individual policy Acceptable Use.
Policy Manual page {PAGE} of { NUMPAGES }, Acceptable Use Policy page
{={PAGE}-{PAGEREF AcceptUse}} of {={PAGEREF AcceptUseEnd} - {PAGEREF
AcceptUse}} will insert "Policy Manual page 343 of 1026, Acceptable Use
policy page 12 of 18".
You need to know that a {PAGE} field is a special case of field. It does
not "generate" content, it "returns" it. The PAGE field returns the number
of the current page within the document. There is only ONE sequence of {
PAGE }, and the field simply reports its current value. The {PAGEREF} field
returns the page number of a named object: in this case a bookmark. You
subtract one from the other.
Note that a Bookmark name must not contain spaces. And that while you
"could" use the starting bookmark of one policy as the ending bookmark for
the previous one, it's safer to add a specific ending bookmark for each
policy. That way you can change the position of documents without having to
reset the bookmarks, and you don't have to allow for intervening blank
pages.
There are at least three other techniques you can use if these methods do
not suit you, get back to use if you think you need them:
* The throw-away master document. Good for untrained users, but needs
special handling to ensure your working documents are not damaged in the
process.
* Referenced Documents. Good if you have to do this on under-powered
computers, or when the final print run exceeds 5,000 pages.
* Linked Documents. Good if you want to continue working on the text after
compiling it: technically complex to learn.
* Individual documents. The old manual method, where you set the starting
page number for each subdocument. Administratively tedious, but survives
conversion to a different word processor.
Get back to us if you need these
Cheers
I've created a policy manual for a client. Each policy is a Word
document. A document may be from 1 to 20 pages and is page numbered
(i.e. page 1 of 10). There are about 500 documents. I now need to also
sequentially number all the pages. Because of the formatting complexity
of each file I don't want to create a master document which may become
corrupted. I'll also consider third party software to do this. Any
suggestions?
--
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. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
