Expert: Suzanne S. Barnhill - 5/6/2005

Question
Thanks again for help on this. When I was in normal view with the paragraph tags turned on, the sections breaks didn't show up. However, the section breaks did appear in outline view.

Thanks!

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Followup To
Question -
Please help!

I have a manual (using Word 2002) that was originally 58 pages. I recently put the manual in outline view, then copied & pasted sections throughout the manual. Now the manual should be at least 4 times as big, yet it's still showing 58 as the highest page number.  

My page numbers & TOC are all screwed up! For example, halfway through the manual it's showing a page as page 3, then it's starts numbering subsequent pages from there.

What did I do wrong?

Thanks!
Answer -
Outline view can be a big help in rearranging a document, but I guess there's no guarantee that something won't go massively wrong! I suspect that what has happened here is that you had a section break somewhere early on, with numbering set to start at 3 after the break. When you copied material before, after, or around the section break, it was included and was pasted along with the copied material, so now page numbering is restarting in the place where you pasted the material as well.

This should not be too difficult to fix if all the section breaks are at least "Next page." Go to View | Header and Footer; if the page numbers are in the footer, switch to it. Use the Show Next button to advance through the headers or footers till you come to one where the numbering restarts. Click the Format Page Number button on the Header and Footer toolbar and change the setting to "Continue from previous section." Repeat for the whole document.

If you have sections that begin with Continuous breaks such that there is a whole section trapped in the middle of a page (so that it has no accessible header or footer), you'll need to (cautiously) use Insert | Page Numbers. Click the Format... button, change the numbering to continuous, then OK out of the Format Page Number dialog and be careful to use Close rather than OK to get out of the Page Numbers dialog (so that you don't insert another page number).

Alternatively, if the section breaks you inadvertently copy/pasted aren't needed later in the document (as they probably aren't), just delete them. This is easier to do in Normal view.

When you've got the numbering sorted so that it's continuous throughout the document, update your TOC.

Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)

Answer
Section breaks should be displayed in Normal view (and by that I mean the view named "Normal," not the one that is "normal" for you, which is probably Print Layout view) whether you have nonprinting characters displayed or not. It will appear as:
================Section Break (Next Page)================

In any case, it sounds as if you have this sorted.

Suzanne S. Barnhill