Second Try: Word 97 Odd/Even Section Breaks

M

Melissa

Susan B was kind enough to point me to an MVP doc, but it
does not actually answer my question.

One section of my document (a single page) requires
Landscape format, and on this same page I have two columns
and a column break. Efforts to create and format this
single-page section give rise to weird changes in the
section breaks' description...with "(Odd Page)" or "(Even
Page)" suddenly displayed, and all sorts of related
weirdness like getting a blank page, page numbering
problems and the mouse wheel getting "stuck" at a certain
page no matter how much I spin it. When I enter File>Page
Layout, the "Section Start" drop down list is sometimes
entirely BLANK and other times displays "Odd" or "Even."
HOWEVER, "Odd/Even" is UNCHECKED for the section when I
begin this process, and REMAINS unchecked...but section
breaks are labeling themselves as if I had it turned on.

Anyone seen this or have an educated guess?

Thank you, and thank you Susan.
 
C

Cindy M -WordMVP-

Hi Melissa,

You don't mention which version of Word is involved in this
problem? Word 2000 was the most unstable, when it came to
oddities with section breaks, but this sounds a bit more
extreme than anything I remember...

My guess would be that the document has become damaged. Have
you tried setting up a new document with the sections and
orientation you need, just to see if that works "better"?
One section of my document (a single page) requires
Landscape format, and on this same page I have two columns
and a column break. Efforts to create and format this
single-page section give rise to weird changes in the
section breaks' description...with "(Odd Page)" or "(Even
Page)" suddenly displayed, and all sorts of related
weirdness like getting a blank page, page numbering
problems and the mouse wheel getting "stuck" at a certain
page no matter how much I spin it. When I enter File>Page
Layout, the "Section Start" drop down list is sometimes
entirely BLANK and other times displays "Odd" or "Even."
HOWEVER, "Odd/Even" is UNCHECKED for the section when I
begin this process, and REMAINS unchecked...but section
breaks are labeling themselves as if I had it turned on.
Click to expand...

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun
8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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B

Bob S

Susan B was kind enough to point me to an MVP doc, but it
does not actually answer my question.

One section of my document (a single page) requires
Landscape format, and on this same page I have two columns
and a column break. Efforts to create and format this
single-page section give rise to weird changes in the
section breaks' description...with "(Odd Page)" or "(Even
Page)" suddenly displayed, and all sorts of related
weirdness like getting a blank page, page numbering
problems and the mouse wheel getting "stuck" at a certain
page no matter how much I spin it. When I enter File>Page
Layout, the "Section Start" drop down list is sometimes
entirely BLANK and other times displays "Odd" or "Even."
HOWEVER, "Odd/Even" is UNCHECKED for the section when I
begin this process, and REMAINS unchecked...but section
breaks are labeling themselves as if I had it turned on.

Anyone seen this or have an educated guess?

Thank you, and thank you Susan.
Click to expand...

In addition to the possibility that the document is broken, there is
one other possibility. I have heard that some printer manufacturers
like to save themselves money (programmer man-hours) at the expense of
their users by not bothering to include the driver code for printing a
landscape page on the back of a portrait page. Instead they use code
to persuade Word to change the section break type.

If you have that flavor of printer, you may need to make your
landscape section two pages back to back. If you have a
PostScript-capable printer you could try the PostScript driver and see
whether it does a better job.

Let us know what happens.

Bob S
 
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