Sections, Headers, Formating Problems

[Davoud]

Office 2004, latest updates, on a Dual G5 running OS 10.4.4.

I'm not new to Word (bought it with my Mac Plus!), but I am new to
applying different headers to different sections/pages. I'm assisting
my wife in preparing a manuscript for submission to a publisher. The
guidelines call for a header that reads "hername, p. 2" beginning with
page 2 and then numbering following pages consecutively. There is no
header on page 1. Each page is a separate section.

This was confusing, but I learned to do it by reading numerous posts in
this group (thank you,) MS documentation, web sources, et. al.

But there's a problem: once the document has been nicely formated in
this way, if the text is edited in such a way that some text at the
bottom of a page is moved down to the next page it also pushes the
section break downward so that it no longer coincides with the page
break, thus ruining the header formating. I fixed this by manually
cutting and pasting section breaks back into their proper positions.
That was OK on a short document, but it would be undoable on a very
long document. It would be just about as quick to get a bunch of stones
and a hammer and chisel then deliver the manuscript in a dump truck.

Is there a way to have the section breaks locked/tied to the page
breaks so that they stay in place when text moves to the next page?

We noticed after manually replacing the section breaks that formating
errors seem to have been introduced in the document. Hyphens were
misplaced, tabs were missing, etc. Did we do something wrong, or is
there a software bug at work here?

What else don't I know? ;-)

Many thanks!

Davoud
<http://www.davidillig.com> Arabic, Astronomy, Flowers, Hebrew,
Raspberries, Woodworking, etc.

 

[Davoud]

Daiya Mitchell:

Did the publisher specifically say "there must be a section break between
each page", or are the section breaks something you put in to meet other
requirements of the publisher?

No. The publisher isn't getting a file; they're getting a printed copy.
It was MS Word that told me I needed section breaks between each page
in order to have a different header on each page: "hername p. 2,"
"hername p. 3," etc. The header on all except page 1 is the only
requirement that caused a problem; the other requirements are simple
stuff such as double spacing and certain margin specs.

In any event, I believe that I have figured this out. A section break
must go at the end of the first page only. Then when subsequent editing
causes that one section break to move downward and become separated
from the page break between pages 1 and 2 it is only necessary to go to
View > Normal and move the section break back where it belongs at the
page break. Seems to work OK, and involves minimum effort. I would
imagine this is in the documentation somewhere, but I did extensive
research before posting this, and did not find it anywhere.

If the publisher mandated section breaks, nothing you can do to make this
easy, sorry.

If you thought you needed the section breaks to meet some other requirement,
it's just about guaranteed there's another way to do it, without so many
section breaks. So share the complete requirements, and let's start over.
I hope you have a clean copy of the doc that you can go back to, without all
the section breaks and such.

Section breaks at the end of every page are about the worst idea out
there--and you just found out why.

Took me about 2 seconds to realize this was true!

There is absolutely no way to tie
section breaks to page breaks and to get text to flow over a section break.

I'm guessing that misplaced hyphens are because line breaks are pretty much
the same as section breaks, can't be controlled where they fall. So
inserting your own hyphens is a similarly bad idea.

We hadn't done that. I don't know what happened to the hyphens, but it
is now moot.

Missing tabs, give more detail on where they missing from.

Also moot now.

Daiya

I greatly appreciate you taking time to reply.

Davoud

 

[Davoud]

Actually, still no section breaks needed. Delete the one you have, then...

Once more I am in your debt. Thanks very much.

Of course, I would have figured that out for myself within two or three
hundred years...

And Mr. Huggan, thanks for the URL.

Davoud