Set ALL headers to same as previous

[Ritchie]

I am using Word 2002 SP2 from Office Standard, on Windows XP.
I have a document that uses different odd even headers as well as a different first page header. I have used 'next section breaks' in order to show where a new chapter starts, so that no header will print on this page -- the first page header. The odd header then prints the title of the book, and the even header the title of the current chapter. After adding the section breaks, I painfully went through and changed all 35 section headers to be same as previous, so if I change the first odd and even headers they are all effected. However, I have hit a problem. Section 27 is only 2 pages long, so I only have a first page and on odd page header. Turns out, that my even page header disappears at section 28.

How do I truly display ALL headers? Is there a global way to set them all to same as previous? I realize I could probably go add a bunch of garbage text to section 27 to make it longer than 2 pages, then correct that one header, go back and remove all the extra text, and hope everything turns out but that simply is not a reasonable way for a product to work and his doesn't help me prevent it again. It seems to make sense that if I simply quickly click through all headers (since they are ALL displayed) and make sure every one has the button for same as previous clicked, I should be safe. The menu option says to display all headers, yet it doesn't. And how do I avoid it happening again if I can't globally change them all to same as previous? Would a macro work here? I do not know how to write them.

Side question: While working on a merged document with comments, only about half the comments were showing. As I stepped through the track changes it would stop at these hidden comments, and if I could actually find the word the comment referred to and click inside the word and add a space or character the comment would suddenly reappear. Any ideas?

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?Uml0Y2hpZQ==?=,

I realize I could probably go add a bunch of garbage text to section 27

to make it longer than 2 pages, then correct that one header, go back and
remove all the extra text, and hope everything turns outActually, this is what you need to do, although you don't have to "add a
bunch of garbage"; just Ctrl+Enter for a manual page break, then delete
that.

but that simply is not a reasonable way for a product to work and his

doesn't help me prevent it again.Headers/footers are tricky, since they are controlled by the section break
that FOLLOWS them. They also inherit from the section that follows. Now, in
my experience "Same as Previous" is active by default. If this isn't the
case for you, then something must have happened to change this setting in
the document structure (last paragraph mark). Which version of Word are you
working in? And in which version(s) of Word was this document created?
Since you mention "merged document with comments" it seems the file format
could have been damaged at some time...

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep 30 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or
reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail

 

[Ritchie]

Cindy,

Thanks for the rapid response. Yeah, I am not really sure at what point the section breaks got messed up. I never intentionally set any of the headers to not be same as previous but as I stepped through them, several of them were set to this.

Using: MS Office XP Standard Edition with SP2 installed and running on Windows XP.

This is a book my wife wrote and my brother and I are going through it to proof for mistakes. I am working on a different section than he is, and also updating all the formatting while he is focussing on grammer. I assume that at some point pulling in his changes the section breaks got all whacked out (as did the little problem with not all the comments displaying) even though I tried to tell it to not find formatting changes.

Having a good background in programming, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and actually learn a little VB to fix the problem so I was sure that after I printed 20 copies of this book I didn't have one section that had messed up. Wasn't too bad, took about an hour to read through the MSDN help on writting macros then I came up with this one that seemed to fix all the problems:

Sub FixHeaders()
For Each sec In ActiveDocument.Sections
sec.Headers(wdHeaderFooterPrimary).LinkToPrevious = True
sec.Headers(wdHeaderFooterEvenPages).LinkToPrevious = True
sec.Headers(wdHeaderFooterFirstPage).LinkToPrevious = True
Next sec
End Sub

There might have been a better way than selecting all three possible indices for the headers, but this worked great. All headers fixed, I even went in and intentionally messed several of them up (changed their links, changed the text, so forth) and ran the script and it put them all back to the same as my first header. Next I would like to try and write a script to add a Section Break every place I used a certain style, since that is where the chapters start. There is probably already a place in Word to do this, but I haven't found it so I manually put in the breaks at each chapter.

I am a long time WordPerfect user, but I have so many problems sending my WordPerfect files to other users that I have got to give in to Word. I just can't give up the reveal codes . . . I like it way too much for debugging why in the world is something happening.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?Uml0Y2hpZQ==?=,

Having a good background in programming,

If I'd known that, I'd have pointed you to the VBA stuff
right away Usually, it ends up taking longer to
instruct someone how to set up and use such a macro, and
since this is an end-user group...

Glad you've got it all straightened out!

Next I would like to try and write a script to add a Section Break every place I used a certain

style, since that is where the chapters start. There is probably already a place in Word to do
this, but I haven't found it so I manually put in the breaks at each chapter.No, there's nothing built into Word for this. An AutoText entry containing the break + empty
paragraph pre-formatted with the style is about as close as you can get without using VBA. And
probably what I'd do if nothing else weighed in for a macro solution (such as having fun <g>).

Cindy Meister