misbehaving ToC quandry

[Guest]

I've been fighting with a Table of Contents problem that I just cannot
figure out.

This is a document in Word 2002 (used within Windows XP). When its ToC is
updated it consistently gives the wrong page for one entry.

I created a skeleton version of the document, replacing actual text with the
word "text" to keep things simple, and placed this document at:

http://www.hold.orthohelp.com/problemToC.DOC

The problem has to do with the ToC entry for "Part I A Little History"

which the ToC consistently shows as being on page 2, even though it actually
is on page 1.

Does anyone have an idea how to fix this? I've looked at the show/hide
codes but just cannot figure out why it is doing this. Any help would be
appreciated.

Jeff

 

[Jay Freedman]

When I look at this document, the page where the "Part I" heading appears does
in fact claim to be page 2 -- and so does the page after it. That's despite the
fact that each page is in a section marked to start page numbers at 1. This is
abnormal behavior, possibly due to corruption in one or more section breaks.

Looking at the document in Normal View, there are many occurrences of a page
break, a continuous section break, and another page break without any
intervening characters or paragraph marks. There's no reason for all this
complication where either a plain page break or a single next-page section break
would do. You need a new section _only_ when something stored at the section
level (page numbering, header or footer formatting, or page margins or
orientation) needs to change.

If you clean up the breaks
(http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/WorkWithSections.htm) and reset the
starting page numbers in the new sections, the page numbers and TOC will update
correctly.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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[Terry Farrell]

To add to Jay's reply, you need to minimise many of the manual page breaks
as well as all those section breaks. In some cases, I expect that you want
the next page to start on the right hand page. You can achieve this by
either using Section Break, Next Odd Page or better still, add the
Paragraph, PageBreakBefore attribute to the first line of following page.

If you are adding some of the Section Breaks because you want to change
chapter title in the Header or Footer, then look at using the StyleRef field
instead of using section breaks.

There is definitely a corruption in there somewhere and ridding all those
page breaks followed by section breaks - most of which are not required -
will probably resolve the problem.

 

[Guest]

Just wanted to thank you both for your advice. Using your pointers, I
solved the ToC page problem I was having.

It is great having guys like you to help.

Jeff