Footnotes/Redline & Strikeout/Cross-References

[Guest]

I work in an office where a person has a document with 44 footnotes.
Tracking (Redline & Strikeout) was turned one. One footnote was deleted.
Several footnotes were cross-referenced back to other footnotes. Some
footnotes were cut and pasted as paragraphs, and some paragraphs were cut and
pasted as footnotes (I believe that all formatting was retained -- "keep text
only" was not used). One footnote was marked as "deleted" and all following
footnotes were not numbered correctly and none of the cross-references after
this point would update. Could not force the footnotes to number, and could
not "update" the fields of the cross-referenced footnotes. I tried to
recreate this document and was unable to. Anyone else ever heard of this?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Usually with footnotes, cross-references, etc AND tracking changes together,
the numbers will sort themselves out *after* all Changes have been Accepted.
But you have to Accept the Changes, not just change the View Showing Markup
setting.

 

[Guest]

Thanks. I tried that, but when all the changes were accepted, everything
after the deleted footnote would not renumber (#18 was deleted, but for some
reason the footnotes went 18 (deleted), 24, 25, 26, 27 .... The
cross-references in the footnotes to other footnotes showed as being struck
out and changed, but when changes were accepted in the document, the
cross-references reverted back to the incorrect field.

It may make a difference that this is a network environment, and there were
2 different users working on the document. I also discovered that the
document had been copied from a previous document that a third person had
actually created.

Thanks.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hmmm, I don't know...

Are you sure the footnotes were properly deleted, by deleting the reference
mark in the text? Use Edit | Go To and see if Word finds hidden footnotes
at 19-23. Show hidden text, just in case.

With two different users--I think it's possible to show only one user's
changes, and just accept those....make sure that didn't happen?

Since only one person should be able to edit the doc at time, three
contributors can create confusion, but should not in itself cause
corruption. But you could try the corrupt doc techniques ON A COPY if you
think it may be corrupt.

The first way to check for a corrupt document is to
copy the entire thing, *excluding* the last paragraph mark, into a new
document. That last paragraph mark holds a lot of information which can get
corrupted, and copying the text into a document with a fresh one keeps your
formatting, but can fix some glitches.

A paragraph mark is a ¶. Click on ¶ on the standard toolbar to show
nonprinting characters, including paragraph marks.

Additional fixes here:
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm

DM