Word: Jump ahead in page numbering?

[MrRedwood]

I'm compiling large documents that sometimes must have insertions (e.g., previously printed stuff) that is accounted for in the page numbering.

When the insertion is only a page or two I often just create fake pages ("replace this placeholder with..."), but when an entire Annual Report is inserted, I don't want to accidentally print a huge number of "replace this page" pages.

I've been using Sections with manually set page numbers instead, but that has the problem that they don't automatically increment (or decrement) when the document is edited.

Is there some way of creating a placeholder section that actually increments the Page Number variable up by a specified amount?

Thanks much...
--
Richard

 

[mintjulep]

Sounds like you're close. With section breaks you can restart automatic numbering from whatever number you want at each section.

 

[MrRedwood]

But I did get that far. The next page is the first of a new section, and has an appropriate manually set page numbers.

The problem is when one of my writers adds text to a section, and another shuffles paragraphs between sections, etc., forcing a complete manual adjustment of those manually set page numbers. The whole point of automatic page numbering is that manual adjustments will eventually be forgotten or done wrong. I'm hoping to have a single page placeholder that automatically 'counts for' some specific number of pages in the automatic pagination. That way the following section wouldn't need to be manually adjusted.

 

[mintjulep]

Well I'm really not sure what you mean by manually set page numbers.

The use of Insert | Page | Page Numbers ... | Format ... | Start at

in combination with section breaks will do exactly what you say that you want to do.

 

[MrRedwood]

Sorry I haven't made this clear: that is precisely what I am already doing.

Scenario: Section 1 is currently 20 pages; section 2 is a document that is four pages long that will be inserted after printing; section 3 is another 10 pages.

Section 2 is currently a single page marked "replace this with blah blah". Section 3 is preceded by a section break, with "start at" set to "25".

One of my contributors makes edits to Section 1; it is now 21 pages. That manually set page number is still 25, which is now incorrect. I'll need to manually adjust it to 26. It would be so easy to overlook that that I'll end up checking it far, far more often than necessary.

What I really want is to be able to put "+4" in instead of "25" or "26", so it would bump up whatever the default would be by four pages. (I tried the "+4" -- Word says page numbers must be between 0 and 32766).

I doubt it makes any difference, but I'm using Word 2004 on Mac and Word 2003 on XP.

 

[mintjulep]

Gonna need VBA it think.

 

[fumei]

Where is macropod and his field expertise? This can probably be done with fields.

It can certainly be done with VBA. I would do it as a document closing routine - to adjust that page number by whatever is the page count in Section 1 + 4.

But again, there is likely a field solution.

Gerry
My paintings and sculpture

 

[MrRedwood]

I've been trying to explore various fields to do this, and it all came down to this:
[tt]{ SET PAGE { = { PAGE } + 20 } }[/tt]
doesn't work -- apparently it discards the result or creates a bookmark PAGE that is different from the 'real' PAGE.

[tt]{ SET Foobar { = { PAGE } + 20 } }[/tt]
does result in a correct value, so it is just that the real PAGE value apparently can't be set.

I suspect the only way of doing this is by faking the page numbers by using a bookmark instead of PAGE. I might experiment with this, but I suspect that some of my users know enough about Word to break this by editing 'their' headers or footers

 

[macropod]

Hi MrRedwood,

Are the inserted documents on the same system in a location where you can link to them?

If so, the simplest way to deal with this would likely be to use an INCLUDETEXT field to import those documents into the one you're working with. That way, you don't need to have all these section breaks and manual page-numbering restarts - they'll be updated automatically as the source documents expand/contract. Using an INCLUDETEXT field will also cause the imported documents to adopt the same style formatting for the most part as in your target document.

If you don't like the INCLUDETEXT field's effects when used this way, you could put a field into each source documents, coded along the lines of:
{SET DocPages {NUMPAGES}}
then use INCLUDETEXT fields in your existing target document to add the values from those bookmarks to your page numbers, along the lines of:
{={PAGE}+{INCLUDETEXT "C:/My Documents/My File.doc" DocPages}}

Cheers

[MS MVP - Word]

 

[MrRedwood]

Only a small number of them are actually Word docs, but I'll try that trick for those -- thanks.

The rest are pre-printed things we get from outside the company; PDFs are becoming more common. I think I remember that the Macintosh version of Word can actually insert PDFs into the Word document, but that doesn't play on the old version of Word I have at this office (2002/2003).

If I was the only person fiddling with these (I'm not -- I'm just the only one that knows what he's doing then I'd replace the page numbers with a variable I could manipulate, but instead I'll stick with the problem I've got.

 

[macropod]

Hi MrRedwood,

While you can insert pdfs into a Word document, you can't have them display and take up the corresponding number of pages - the best you can have is an icon on the page where they're inserted.

As for the variable, you could do this with an ASK field for each section, coded along the lines of:
{ASK {QUOTE Offset{SECTION}} "How many pages to offset Section {SECTION}?"}
and the following field where you want the page# for that section to appear
{={PAGE}+{QUOTE Offset{SECTION}}}

Note that the offsets would have to be cumulative, and you'd need to use this form of coding (with both the ASK and calculation fields) in all sections after the first one in which its used, unless you have a case where the final insertion is in the middle of the document. In that case, if the last inserted section was Section5, for example the page# coding for section6 etc could be expressed as:
{={PAGE+Offset5}

Cheers

[MS MVP - Word]