NUMPAGES is dumb-pages

[Gemma M]

Now, I know this is going to be an old chestnut, but here goes.

NUMPAGES does not, after printing a document, contain the numbe of pages in
the document. It contains, depending upon when and where you look at it,
the current page number or 1.

I have Word 2000, with all the latest SPs and printing is in the foreground.
But still this field is unreliable. I have tried my actions on Word 2003
too, and that is also unreliable.

This has been around for so long, someone must have a reliable work-around,
or a patch, or a registry hack or some thing that will cure this problem.

PLEASE help me. The management enemy are breathing down my neck about this.

Gem

 

[Charles Kenyon]

There is a bug in Word that is different in different versions (including
different SRs).
See http://www.addbalance.com/word/pagexofy.htm or
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/PageXofY.htm for information on Page
X of Y problems. You may also want to take a look at:
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Numbering/PageNumbering.htm. If it applies
you may also want to look at
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Numbering/PageNumber0.htm.

 

[Gemma M]

Thanks Charles.

I found that I had all the up-to-date service packs. The problem was being
caused by the fact that my automated process was opening the Word document,
and then applying a pass-word protection to it, to prevent users changing
its contents.

Unfortunately, this "protection" was observed, selectively, by the process
that updates NUMPAGES. I tried forcing an update to NUMPAGES (using
print-view, normal-view, print-view toggling etc...), and then applying the
pass-word protection lock. This just resulted in NUMPAGES containing
another WRONG value!

For a product that had a prototype running under Windows 2 (I know, I used
that prototype, and it looked promising in those days), there seems to have
been little improvement over the last 15 years!

Gem

 

[Charles Kenyon]

I have macros that lock all fields in a document - including in headers and
footers. Unfortunately, it locks PAGE and NUMPAGE fields as well so I have
to unlock those by hand or they give the wrong result. It sounds like your
"helper" software may be doing something similar.