Hi MS Office Forum,

I'm putting together my dissertation and it has lots of cross-references to different tables and figures. I'm of course using MS Word's Caption/Cross-reference tool. But there always seems to be a problem with some of the cross references when I insert them into my text. Note I'm using MS Word 2007.

For instance, I'll insert a cross-reference for Table 5-6 as in the example below. This looks great at first. But when I move elsewhere in the document or try in print a problem arises. Basically, MS Office breaks the page and places the cross-reference on a new page. I've gone back to try and fix it, but the problem just re-emerges. It's highly annoying!! The only way I know how to ultimately get rid of it is by manually managing the Captions/Cross-references.

Any help would be appreciated. I wonder if it's not somehow linked to how the Caption is formatted and then picked-up by the cross-reference tool. However, I haven't found any consistent pattern to effectively deal with it.

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WHAT I WANT TO DO:


From one shop in New Orleans, the voucher was found to decrease the price of fertilizers by 40-50% (Table 5-6). The policy only extended to chemical fertilizers and not insecticides. The introduction of the fertilizer voucher system, was beginning to incline villagers in Houston to move back to chemical fertilizers.

WHAT MS OFFICE DOES FOR ME:
From one shop in New Orleans, the voucher was found to decrease the price of fertilizers by 40-50% (

[New Page]
Table 5-6). The policy only extended to chemical fertilizers and not insecticides. The introduction of the fertilizer voucher system, was beginning to incline villagers in Houston to move back to chemical fertilizers.

I work with cross-references quite a bit, and that is the craziest thing ever! That has to be a pain in the neck! Cross-references usually work very well, so something odd is going on.
Can you upload a sample? I have to step out for a bit, but will sure have a look when I get back.

ahave a look:

http://word.tips.net/Pages/T001599_U...eferences.html

http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/.../msg02104.html

I got it to work once, but difficult to replicate. There's a certain sequence to turn a paragraph marker from "Normal" to "Citation". It's really annoying.

Honestly, why does MS have to make this so complicated.

Like I said, I use this very frequently without ever experiencing this. I don't have to do anything to change the paragraph marker.

Hi,

I am all too familiar with the problem you describe. I think the solution has always been to un-do any manual page break (Page Layout tab, breaks menu) that is immediately before the figure/table I am cross-refersencing, and replace it with a less-manual type of page break (right-click. select Paragraph in the resulting menu, click Page Break Before button). Or perhaps I've even had to find some way to undo *those* styles of page breaks, too, in order to solve the page break problem. Then I regenerate the cross references by doing the usual Select-All (Control+A) F9 and hopefully there's no longer the strange behavior.

I think what's happening is that when you insert a cross reference to a figure/table that has a page break in front of that figure/table, Word is "grabbing" the page break into its information for the *cross reference* to that figure/table, as if you want that page break to insert too, which of course you don't!

I think those page breaks are also the culprit for the strange large sections of unwanted cross-reference text magically inserting into my beautiful document, but I'm not sure. Word is the most exasperating program I've ever worked with. Adobe Framemaker is swell -- very predictable, and you don't have to learn quirky behaviors like, get this one -- "Oh, since you highlighted the whole numbered para with the Emphasis character style (except the numbers), I'm going to italicize even the NUMBER to the left of the text you highlighted, even though you didn't/can't highlight the number itself." You end up in that case having to resort to highlighting only a *subportion* of the words in that para, and then repeat with yet the remaining subportion (except for the number, which does not highlight, of course).

Dear all,

I am also having this issue. Both for table and figure cross-references, when I print (or print preview), word inserts a page break. There is a page break (or a section break in some cases) between cross-reference and caption, but these need to be there.

I wonder if anyone has any consistent solution?

Given the I spent good money on this product, is anyone out there from microsoft available to find a solution? It's messing up my PhD¬!!!!!

Cheers

David

Hi David,

Your description suggests you have the page/section break attached to the caption paragraph. Printing/reviewing the document causes the cross-references to update and, hence, reveal the problem.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi,

I do not understand your apparently saying that there is an inherent problem with associating a paragraph break with a caption. If we want a page break to happen at the beginning of a caption, why should that page break necessarily be thrown into any *cross reference* to that caption? Word makes the most horrible assumptions I've ever seen. Currently, I am dealing with Word's inserting unwanted pieces of text into my document, with that text behaving like a cross-reference (is dark-highlighted and clickable). I think this is somehow tied to Word's confusion whenever we have a page break built into a heading. When we then CROSS-REFERENCE that heading, all hell breaks loose -- with Word inserting the heading as a cross reference but also inserting the text that follows that heading, as if we wanted that text to be inserted, too. This runs along the same lines of Word's "thinking" "you couldn't possibly want that entire word italicized without also wanting to italicize the whole paragraph -- I'll do you a favor and automatically highlight the whole paragraph and make it near insanity to get you to highlight just the single word you want! You'll end up having to italicize the word letter by letter just to get it and only IT italicized"!!!

Hi alysenet,

With Captions and Headings, whenever you cross-reference one, Word creates a hidden bookmark to the whole paragraph.

If you insert a page break between the text of a paragraph and the paragraph's end marker (ie the ¶ symbol), that page break becomes part of the pragraph's text. Similarly, if you insert a paragraph break at the end of an already cross-referenced Caption or Heading, what you're effectively telling Word is that you want to extend the range covered by the cross-referencing bookmark. And that's how you can end up with extraneous text in the cross-reference. You just need to take a little more time learning how things work.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]