Word 2008 document printed empty; TOC showed 2 of 4 heading levels

[Barbara]

I just upgraded to Office 2008 on an i Mac Intel Core Duo running Tiger (10.4.11).

1. The document came up in the print preview empty and the paper just rolled through the printer empty. Another test document printed just fine. There was some hidden text but I cleared that just in case. No difference. Perhaps something about the formatting? Any clues?

2. It is a complex document with formatted TOC headings. I tried to make 4 levels of headings for the TOC, and modified the styles. My modifications showed in the document, but not in teh choices of TOC styles in the document elements bar. The document did not seem to "take" all of the headings directives (the little black square in the margin did not always show up), and has become very slow to respond (scrolling is reminiscent of 10 - 15 years ago). The formatted TOC showed all of the level 1 & 2 headings, some 3s and no 4s.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Barbara:

Eeeewwww: Some NASTY bugs here!

The first is that Word 2004 has the ability to choose a predefined format
for the TOC, or a format of "From Template". This function appears to be
missing from Word 2008. If it is, things are getting pretty futile...

The second is that when you click on one of the TOC samples in the Document
Elements Bar, Word is going to reset the styles in the document to the
built-in formatting. People who use TOCs must urgently find a way to
prevent that happening.

The third is that the TOC samples have no "labels", so I cannot tell you "We
must use the xyz format for TOCs in this company". Because the formats
don't have names!

In Word 2004, you could create an exactly-specified format for your Table of
Contents, and save that in the document template for re-use. I can't find
those controls in Word 2008.

I have copied this message to Curt, our resident Software Engineer from
Microsoft. I suspect he will be back to us shortly with instructions.

Cheers

I just upgraded to Office 2008 on an i Mac Intel Core Duo running Tiger
(10.4.11).

1. The document came up in the print preview empty and the paper just rolled
through the printer empty. Another test document printed just fine. There
was some hidden text but I cleared that just in case. No difference. Perhaps
something about the formatting? Any clues?

2. It is a complex document with formatted TOC headings. I tried to make 4
levels of headings for the TOC, and modified the styles. My modifications
showed in the document, but not in teh choices of TOC styles in the document
elements bar. The document did not seem to "take" all of the headings
directives (the little black square in the margin did not always show up), and
has become very slow to respond (scrolling is reminiscent of 10 - 15 years
ago). The formatted TOC showed all of the level 1 & 2 headings, some 3s and no
4s.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[Barbara]

John,

Thank you for your prompt reply. I have been experimenting all morning. I now have a document that will suit my purpose, though I have just done the TOC manually. My comments below are “for the good of the order”, so to speak, in hopes that update developers can fix these apparent bugs in the new 2008 Word. This is what else I now know:

To clarify, I only attempted the TOC formatting after installing the Word 2008 because, as a novice TOCer, it was not immediately obvious to me how to accomplish it in 2004. The instructions in 2008 were imminently clear, and the process worked, as far as it went (details above already). I agree that it is frustrating that the TOC formats in the elements bar are unlabeled and seem to be unchangeable, in spite of the apparent ability to modify them in the formatting palette (including auto update and add to template options). Question: when choosing something to make a heading type, should you point to the line (choosing also the ending paragraph mark by default) or just the word(s) desired? I don’t think it makes a difference because I did it both ways with no difference that I could see.

Perhaps that document just got corrupted. In addition to the slow scrolling, I had trouble changing the date in the footer (it wouldn’t “take” the changes: when I changed 2 digits in the date the whole footer disappeared, the headings did not always “take” until the 3rd or 4th try, and so on). I finally just discarded that version.

With respect to the printing issue, I reverted to a previous draft of the document (pre-TOC), pasted the intermediate changes into it (from the buggy version), and it printed just fine (excluding the hidden text, as it should have). Also, it responded to all changes, including another attempt at formatting a TOC (same inconsistency issues; I removed all that formatting) with no slowdown or other problem. Still printed fine, ignoring hidden text.

When I saved it to preserve the new/best version, I noticed that I could choose word document (apparently generic) and word 97-2004 document, among others. Why not 2008?

Barbara

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Barbara:

OK, put me to work, why don't you

Let's see if I can come up with some answers for these...

My comments below are ³for the good of the order², so to speak, in
hopes that update developers can fix these apparent bugs in the new 2008 Word.

Which is incredibly important, not just for the developers, but for the rest
of us, including people coming along later.

The instructions in 2008 were imminently clear, and the
process worked, as far as it went (details above already).

Yes, the Help has improved a great deal in Word 2008. But Kevin will be
delighted to hear that you noticed

I agree that it is
frustrating that the TOC formats in the elements bar are unlabeled and seem to
be unchangeable, in spite of the apparent ability to modify them in the
formatting palette (including auto update and add to template options).

I regard this as a major issue, which I hope they will get onto very
quickly. Until they do, book and report authors working with predefined
style specifications won't be able to sue the mechanism!

Question: when choosing something to make a heading type, should you point to
the line (choosing also the ending paragraph mark by default) or just the
word(s) desired? I don¹t think it makes a difference because I did it both
ways with no difference that I could see.

It does make a difference How much detail can you handle?

From the point of view of the TOC, it makes no difference at all. But from
the point of view of formatting the document, it affects which parts of the
style are applied.

Word 2008 has the new ability to have styles that have two "halves". In
previous versions, each style was either a Paragraph style or a Character
style. In this version, certain styles can be both.

If you select the paragraph mark before applying the style, and you apply a
paragraph style or a combined style, you will get both the paragraph
formatting and the character formatting applied to the whole paragraph.

If you do NOT select the paragraph mark, and you apply the same style, you
will apply ONLY the character formatting component of the style. You won't
get the spacing or indenting.

For the TOC, this makes no difference. The TOC generator is looking only
for the name of the style. And text formatted with a Heading 2 style will
go in the TOC, regardless of whether it has the whole style applied or only
the character part.

But things such as Keep Lines Together or Keep With Next will not work, so
your pagination will inexplicably not work!

Perhaps that document just got corrupted. In addition to the slow scrolling, I
had trouble changing the date in the footer (it wouldn¹t ³take² the changes:

Yes: That is a classic symptom of a corrupt document. The headers and
footers are stored in the default section break. If that corrupts, it can
become "read-only", preventing you from updating the footer.

When I saved it to preserve the new/best version, I noticed that I could
choose word document (apparently generic) and word 97-2004 document, among
others. Why not 2008?

In my version it says "Word Document (.docx)" which is your signal that the
document is using the new file format internally.

Debate rages as to whether that should be made more clear. If they did,
some users would thing "Ooooh, that's new and different, I do not want to do
that." Then you would get documents stuck for years in the old format, and
people complaining that various things did not work.

I occasionally still see a corporate document that has never been converted
up from its original Word 2 format (from 1989...) Not only are those old
formats too simple to contain many of the modern artefacts that Word can
create, they are also not secure. Bad Persons can hide dangerous content in
them, and Word has no reliable way of detecting it.

So Microsoft has adopted a policy of "strongly suggesting" that users should
upgrade their documents to the latest version each time they open them.
They do not go quite so far as to "insist" for formats later than Word 6.
But that's what all this stuff about Compatibility Mode and the
Compatibility Checker is all about: it is doing as much as possible to
persuade users to upgrade their documents to stay safe

Hope this helps

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]