Word: Repagination horror
January 14, 2011So there I was, finishing up editing a Word 2007 document. One of my last tasks was to update the Table of Contents (TOC). So I clicked the relevant Update Table button and off Word went…
I watched this train wreck as it happened and could do nothing about it — all I had on screen was the ‘spinning circle of death’ that Office 2007 documents display when they are processing something.
After seeing the information displayed in the status bar (below), Word finally gave me a message that it couldn’t deal with a document with that many pages (I presume the 2780 pages, not the 214 pages) and then stopped.
I’ve seen this happen before (not often), and have no idea what causes it, how to fix it etc. In this case, I did a ‘Save As’ on the document and saved it with a new file name. After doing that, the TOC updated without a problem.
Anyone got any ideas why Word spits it occasionally like this?
It usually happens when you have the “Automatically Update” checkbox checked on the Modify Style dialog box and somehow the style gets set to “Page Break Before”.
At least that’s what’s happened to me in the past. I hate it when Word sets that checkbox by default.
Thanks Mike. I’ll check those settings. However, Auto Update Styles is one I ALWAYS turn off. It only happened the once with this document, so I suspect that may not be the reason. But I’ll still check to make sure.
And thanks for a possible cause. I don’t think I would ever have thought to check that!
I checked. No auto update set on any of the styles. So I tried updating the TOC in the old doc again — this time it got to well over 10,000 pages before I killed the process with Task Manager!
Hmmm… sounds like something’s probably setting the Normal style to “Page break before”. Weird.