Word 2003 Book Fold Problems

[clapper]

I've read the book fold posts here but nothing has helped yet.

I run an IT Dept for goodness sakes, but I just cannot seem to make this
work. I'm about to go out of my mind and hope someone can help.

I have an 8 page document in Word 2003 that I'm trying to print as a folded
booklet. 4 pages to each single sheet of 8.5x11 paper. Printing in manual
duplex mode.

My pages are coming out in a crazy order and somtimes vaious pages just
don't print out at all. I'm consistently getting three sheets of paper being
printed on, even though with 8 pages, it should only be two. And I do
actually have 8 pages in my document, no more, no less.

As far as I can tell, I'm doing exactly what the Word Help instructions are
telling me to do. But what's being printed out makes no sense. For instance
(besides some pages never printing) my page 1 is always printed on the
left-hand side of a sheet of paper. Shouldn't it be on the right, as the
'cover' to the booklet?

This has to be something silly I'm missing, but I sure can't see it.

Any help?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I've always maintained that the "Book fold" feature was not ready for prime
time. I've occasionally gotten it to work for short documents, but for long
ones (where I'll inevitably need to reprint one or more pages), I stick with
the method described at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/BookletPrinting.htm. This might be a
bit complex if you're trying to duplex (especially automatically), but in my
case I'm always creating single-sided pages to be duplexed in
copying/printing.

 

[clapper]

Suaznne,

Thanks for the advice, although now I'm just curious and won't stop fooling
with it.

I do notice that text boxes are possibly causing problems. Ever heard of that?

Martin

 

[clapper]

Suzanne,

Using 2003, I finally have book fold working.

FYI, it's definitely something with text boxes. Once I took all of them out,
everything worked fine. However, I was able to create new ones that did not
cause the problem again. As far as I can tell, the boxes were created
identically, but obviously something about the original ones was screwy.

Who knows.

Thanks again for your help.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I wouldn't be at all surprised. Any kind of floating object is just asking
for trouble at any time, I think. I keep everything inline insofar as
possible, but then I don't usually have to do extremely complex layouts.