Any MS Word Experts?

[The Knize]

I have Googled this problem and can't find a solution.

I was trying to get a document off to a client, but a portion of the text of a footnote on the first page intermittently was diappearing, on my laptop sceen and when printed. I seemed to be able to get it back temporarily by doing random things, but I have no idea what of those things brought back the footnote. Only a portion of the footnote would disappear.

Microsoft Office Word 2007 runing on Windows 7. Does not seem to happen in draft view. Does in "Print View."

Anyone have any ideas what is happening and/or how to fix it?

[dpm802]

I'm not an expert, but here's an educated guess.

Your problem may be related to Page Breaks.

Enable that thing in your toolbar that looks like a backwards "P" ... that will show you all of the non-printing (formatiing) codes, and allow you to see whether the page break happens after the footnote (what you want) or before (which forces it off of the page.)

[The Knize]

I'm not an expert, but here's an educated guess.

Your problem may be related to Page Breaks.

Enable that thing in your toolbar that looks like a backwards "P" ... that will show you all of the non-printing (formatiing) codes, and allow you to see whether the page break happens after the footnote (what you want) or before (which forces it off of the page.)

Thanks for the quick response. By backwards p, do you mean the paragraph sign? I turned on display of all formatting. I do not see anything. Of course, right now the footnote dsiplays fine, which is consistent with what it was doing previously.

[dpm802]

Thanks for the quick response. By backwards p, do you mean the paragraph sign? I turned on display of all formatting. I do not see anything. Of course, right now the footnote dsiplays fine, which is consistent with what it was doing previously.

Uh, yeah, I guess its the paragraph sign. The shortcut is "Ctrl-F10" using OpenOfficeWriter, which is as close as I have to MS-Word. When you mouse over the symbol, it should say "Nonprinting Characters" if you have ToolTips enabled.

Once you find the page-break, you can shorten up your document by using any or all of these tricks:

1. choosing a slightly smaller font
2. eliminating the blank line between paragraphs
3. going from double-space to line-and-a-half spacing

This should pull the footnote back up above the page-break, or you can move the page-break manually so that it is below the footnote. If you move the break manually, though, it will put the footnote on the first page, but the rest of the doc might not print correctly.

[dpm802]

Here is a link to the official MS-Word support.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/

Poke around under "Page Breaks and Section Breaks" and "Page Setup."

[The Knize]

Thanks. Still not seeing any page breaks. I think I have been pretty much over that MS help cite.

I see folks asking about the same issue in various place with no solutions.

I hate Microsoft.

[dpm802]

Thanks. Still not seeing any page breaks. I think I have been pretty much over that MS help cite.

I see folks asking about the same issue in various place with no solutions.

I hate Microsoft.

That's why I use OpenOffice. Its free. www.openoffice.org

[dfennewald]

I had a similar problem with automatic text within the footer. There were extra breaks in the pages -- section breaks and page breaks. Either one can mess with your footers and you have to specifically look for section breaks. Once I cleared all of those I applied the footers and then reinserted page breaks as needed.

[tomviolence]

could be your margins or the printer driver. Try print preview and then change the margins to make them smaller. Try printing to a different printer (I like using print to pdf)

[maxman]

I have Googled this problem and can't find a solution.

I was trying to get a document off to a client, but a portion of the text of a footnote on the first page intermittently was diappearing, on my laptop sceen and when printed. I seemed to be able to get it back temporarily by doing random things, but I have no idea what of those things brought back the footnote. Only a portion of the footnote would disappear.

Microsoft Office Word 2007 runing on Windows 7. Does not seem to happen in draft view. Does in "Print View."

Anyone have any ideas what is happening and/or how to fix it?

If you called me, I'd be swearing under my breath at this statement. That's an IT helpdesk nightmare!

MS products are notorious for trying to "help" you by being "intuitive".
Unfortunately they usually fail miserably most of the time.
Footnotes and Headers have odd formatting most times. Things like page numeration and special inserted text plays by different rules.

Using the Paragraph markers is a great suggestion to see the formatting.
Also, don't forget that you can unlink headers and footers from different document sections.

Typically we don't use the draft view for documents. The print view gives you the proper view that will be most like the printer will print out. Some still opt to use it in draft view, but I don't see why.

Has this ever happened before?
Do you use headers and footers often?
Do you use draft view instead of print view often?

It's kind of hard without seeing the actual document what might be going on.

[davros]

This is a bit of a stab in the dark, but on earlier versions of Word, I found the easiest way to deal with footnote formating strangeness like this was to adjust the bottom margin of the page. You turn on the vertical ruler if not already on, and nudge the margin a point up or down, and the program seems to reformat the footnote display, which usually sorted things out if they'd gone wonky. N.B. it isn't necessary to change things enough to be noticeable; a couple of mm either way should do it.

If it happens a lot, this will be a pain, but for a one off or occasional problem it can suffice for a workaround.