Word 2007: Building Blocks add extra characters to fields

I’ve been testing a new Word 2007 template in preparation for a very large document that multiple authors are likely to work on during 2011. So I’m looking at all sorts of ways to save authors time so that their main task becomes writing the content, not fiddling with formatting, headers and footers etc. And a side benefit is to save me time during the many QA/editing/review cycles that I’m likely to be involved in.

One of the areas I’ve been investigating is the built-in document automation and Building Blocks in Word 2007. And while some of these features are very useful, I’ve come across an issue that I can’t fix. I’ve Googled the problem, but either I’m not using the correct search terms, or no-one else has come across this before.

I’d appreciate any help or suggestions that you can offer to fix this.

I’ll use the Table of Contents (TOC) as an example (the problem occurs with other insertions like this too).

If I insert one of the built-in Table of Contents from the References > Table of Contents tab, it goes in nicely. The default style for the TOC heading is TOC Heading.

Now, if I reference this TOC Heading style in a field using the StyleRef field code, I get a left arrow character inserted as part of the field in front of the Table of Contents text.

The left arrow is not part of the TOC heading, and it’s not in the field code (see screen shot below).

 

So where has it come from — and, more to the point, how do I get rid of it?

I’ve also seen this with other Building Blocks I’ve added, and those ones get an arrow before AND after the text. I abandoned using Building Blocks for the document title because of this as I wanted to use StyleRef fields for these elements in my headers.

I’ve created my own TOC and added my own TOC title manually to get around this issue. So much for using the built-in automation…

Has anyone got any ideas as to how I can get rid of these characters? I’d like to take advantage of the built-in automation and building blocks, but not if it makes a mess of my headers and footers.

[Links last checked December 2010]