Page numbers in page header sometimes shown as "0"

[Tomas]

I've got a problem with a set of of department templates I have created. Some
users (or computers?) don't get correctly updated page numbers in the page
header. The symptom is one or more of the following:
- Page 0/10 on all pages
- Page 0/0 on all pages
- Page 1/0, 2/0... and so on on all pages
- Table of contents shows page 0 for all references
In most cases the printed result is correct, in some (rare) cases also the
printout has been claimed to be wrong.
In some cases the symptom comes and goes while scrolling through the document.

Has anyone seen this? Any thoughts on what the problem might be?
Unfortunately I have not been able to recreate the problem on my computer,
but I have seen it on several other user's.

/Tomas

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Thomas:

This is a well-known problem with several causes.

What happens is that when you first open the document, Word zeros the page
number counter internally, then re-populates it after it has completed
pagination. It has to "count" the pages first.

If the machine has an older version of Word on it/is runing slow/has
insufficient memory, Word may not have completed pagination by the time it
begins to make up the pages for printing. In this case, the page number
fields will be wrong.

First check for older versions of Word. They made multiple attempts to fix
this bug, but were not fully successful until Word 2003. With older
versions of Word, make quite certain (by checking each machine) that they
have the very latest service packs installed. The actual cure for this bug
was in the LAST service pack for Word 07 and Word 2000 and Word 2002.

Now advise the users to check in Tools>Options>Printing to make sure "Update
fields" is checked. If it isn't, the print results will be somewhat
variable.

On older machines with less than 1 GB of RAM, you may have to advise the
users to set Word up for each of their printers to "Print in Reverse Order".
That works around the bug by forcing Word to discover the last page before
it can send any pages to the printer, so it should get it right every time.

Finally, if the documents concerned are corrupt, it may be impossible for
Word to paginate them correctly. Never believe a user who says they created
a document from a template: they never do: they edit their previous version
of the same document!! If they do that every day for a year or two, the
internal structure of the document is pretty mangled. Tell them to start
again by creating directly from the template and the problem may well go
away

Hope this helps -- get back to us if it doesn't.

--

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs

+61 4 1209 1410, <mailto:[email protected]> mailto:[email protected]

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Numbering/PageNumber0.htm