Why is chapter in page number sometimes incorrect in Word?

K

KathyInAZ

I am using Word 2003 and trying to get page numbers to always display in the
page number format that is applied to them.

A 300-page document has section breaks for chapters. Each chapter/section
starts with a numbered Heading 1 style. The footer in each section is set to
"Include chapter number." I know that each section footer is not "linked to
previous" because I see that each footer contains the title of the chapter as
text (and all the chapter names are different).

I have not been able to get each section page number to display the correct
chapter number, even though the page numbers are all set up exactly the same.

Here's what the first page numbers of the first 10 chapters look like right
now.
Chapter 1: Page 1-1
Chapter 2: Page 1-1
Chapter 3: Page 1-1
Chapter 4: Page 4-1
Chapter 5: Page 4-1
Chapter 6: Page 6-1
Chapter 7: Page 7-1
Chapter 8: Page 7-1
Chapter 9: Page 9-1
Chapter 10: Page 9-1

The chapters that have wrong numbering change. I have no idea why. In one
incarnation of this document, all the chapters were starting on Page 6-1.
The next day, most of the chapter numbers were correct.

Unfortunately, I can't send a copy of the document, and I haven't been able
to make these problems happen in another document. I hope this problem
description may ring a bell with someone. Can anyone help me get the page
numbers to be correct?

Thanks in advance for even reading this. Below, I've listed the main
attempted fixes I've tried that I can remember.

Kathy

I have tried everything I could think of, including the following, but I've
had no success.
1. Reapplied the page number formatting.
2. Deleted the page number and added it again.
3. Recalculated all fields in the document.
4. Selected an incorrect page field and recalculated it.
5. Copied the page field from a good footer to a "bad" footer. For example,
I copied the "Page 4-1" on top of an incorrect "Page 1-1," and the pasted
text immediately changed from 4-1 to 1-1.
6. Copied the footer from the original template, which has all the sections
with correct page numbering, and pasted onto a "bad" footer.
7. Converted to PDF. All I remembered doing between the chapter numbers all
starting at 6-1 and then starting with correct page numbers was converting
the file to PDF overnight. But doing that a second time didn't help.
8. Created a new document from the template and pasted in each chapter
separately, making sure there were no breaks in the pasted text (and did this
on a Windows 2000 PC and on a Windows XP PC, both with Word 2003).
9. Converted some versions of the document to and from a master document,
because we really need the document split so multiple people can edit it, but
master and subdocuments seem to be adding to this and other problems.
10. Changed the page number to various different formats--without the
chapter number, with roman numerals, etc. Some sections seem to get stuck:
Either they WILL display a chapter number--right or wrong--regardless of
whether "Include chapter number" is selected, or they will NOT display the
chapter no matter what is selected. The "stuck" problem was probably only in
the master/subdocument incarnations of the document.
11. Printed the first page of a chapter with a bad page number.
 
K

KathyInAZ

Shauna,

Thanks for your reply. (Just FYI, we were given the template, and other
people are using it successfully.)

While searching for an answer to my problem, I had already gone through the
web page you referenced. However, reading it again gave me an idea for
something else to try, which eventually led to removing the section breaks
from my test copy of the document. I was surprised that even then the page
numbers were still wrong. So then I tried selecting one Heading 1, selecting
all the instances all at once, clearing the formatting, and reapplying the
Heading 1 style. That fixed the page number problem, so I did that in the
real copy and split it into subdocuments.

Just when I thought all was well, I checked the table of contents and
noticed that the page number is messed up in some subdocuments (multiples of
page n-1). I tried to fix that for a while and gave up. To get the page
numbering to work properly, I tried removing the subdocuments. The page
numbering wasn't corrected till I deleted all the section breaks that Word
had added before and after each subdocument.

It's still not perfect but at least it's useable now.

Thanks,
Kathy
 
K

KathyInAZ

Stefan,

The answer to your question is yes and no.

I had run across the article you mentioned, too, while searching endlessly
for a solution to our problem. After reading that article, I became highly
suspicious of master document section breaks as a cause of our problems, and
some of the "fixes" we're using support that idea.

I have tried so many different things trying to fix problems that I am not
positive, but I think the page numbering problem happened in one of the
incarnations where I started over from scratch: I copied and pasted each
chapter into the template to create one new document (not a master and
subdocuments). However, the template has section breaks for each chapter,
and weird things happen sometimes when deleting section breaks. (For
example, I would delete an extra "Next Page" section break that had appeared,
and the "Continuous" section break I wanted to keep would turn into a "Next
Page" section break, or vice versa--very annoying.) It's possible that I
pasted a section break and corrupted the new file.

For a while, we were all editing one big document (no master and subdocs),
but the page numbers were still wrong. That problem was corrected in this
document by clearing and reapplying all the Heading 1 style instances.

Just recently, we've been doing okay. Using the corrected document, we
created a master and subdocuments so we can all edit at the same time.
However, to produce a final document, we have to remove all the subdocuments.
Page numbering is still messed up at that point. Once we carefully delete
the section breaks that Word added for subdocuments (and didn't remove while
removing the subdocuments), page numbering is correct and we can create the
PDF.

Master documents appear to cause our page numbering problem.

Kathy
 
K

KathyInAZ

Thank you for the information! We converted to IncludeText fields and have
been so busy that I couldn't respond, even though I kept thinking that you
probably could have saved me time if only I had time to post. Catch 22.

Q1: Based on your experience, do you have any gut feel on whether you think
we're doing something to cause file corruptions or is a lack of resources the
more likely cause?

Now we're at a point where I keep thinking that we're getting file
corruption due to a lack of resources while editing the big file that
includes all the other files. But I'm not 100% sure that resources are the
culprit. The laptop I'm using now has Word 2003 and 1 GB of memory. Last
night I was making changes, thought I saw a corruption happen immediately
after I did something, and Word said that it didn't have enough memory to
undo (or something like that). However, when I went back to previous
versions, it turned out that the corruption had happened earlier, around the
time I deleted some old styles that Styles and Formatting showed as having no
instances.

(I think all the styles were ones we had added. A Word-to-PDF conversion is
hogging my PC right now, so I can't test whether deleting the styles again
will cause problems.)

Q2: How can I be sure that IncludeText fields accurately reflect the source
documents?

I have not been able to determine why sometimes the formatting in source
documents doesn't seem to get updated in the target document, and it makes me
wonder what other missing updates I might not be noticing. For example, both
source and target documents have styles Normal and Body Text. The source
document had a paragraph that was Normal and should have been Body Text, so
we changed it and saved it. However, after updating the IncludeText field in
the target document, the target still had the style Normal for that
paragraph. After several experiments, I tried deleting most of the field
result text in the target document and then hitting F9. That fixed the
problem. Do you have any idea what's going on with that?

I ended up doing something similar to make ctrl-shift-F7 update the source
files, too. I had to empty out the source files to get the ctrl-shift-F7 to
write out all the changes we'd made in the target file.

By the way, after some early experiments and getting no good results leaving
the MERGEFORMAT option that Word sometimes adds to our IncludeText fields,
I've been deleting that option whenever Word "helps" me and adds it.

Q3: Do you know how long PDF conversions should take?

The conversions seem to take forever. Right now, I have a Word document
open that shows 337 pages in the status bar. I started the conversion at
7:15 p.m. It's 10:30 a.m. now and it's still converting. Is this reasonable?

Thanks again for everyone's excellent help.

Kathy
 
S

Stefan Blom

1. Too little RAM could definitely cause corruption. But, how much "too
little" is depends on the file size, and also on how the system is
configured. If single "sub-documents" show sign of corruption, try copying
their contents, except for the final paragraph mark, to a fresh document
(see http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm).

2. If a style from the source affects the text, then the reason is usually a
format switch such as \* MERGEFORMAT or \* CHARFORMAT in the INCLUDETEXT
field code, as you've noticed. Remove these switches.

Also, note that any direct formatting (that is, formatting not in style)
will be visible in the target document. Make sure to format the text in
styles only (but, of course, you are allowed to override style settings by
formatting single words in, say, italic or bold).

3. This depends on the size of the file, obviously, but probably also on the
PDF converter. I don't think anyone can give a specific answer to the
question.

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


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