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I've used Word since [you] were born. And I've almost
mastered it. I've even written code that "wrote" Word docs for me into the many hundreds of pages. But I've never been able to do certain basic things (except in VBA, sometimes). One of these is now eating my lunch: The doc is about 100pp. There are about three dozen figures, etc. (I caption all of them as "Figure.") These are the hassles: 1. I will insert a caption below a picture. It vanishes completely and forever. I never even see it the first time. However, it continues to increment the sequence number for the captions. I can't find it. GO TO does not even find the ones I can see! 2. Sometimes the caption sequence numbers get out of order. I have some tricks that sometimes work, but these are stupid ways to use my time. I bet I could write a code that could author this document, but isn't that even more ridiculous?!?!? So, how do I force these captions to renumber in order? Before you answer, read-on... 3. I've been through [way too much trouble] trying to get photos, graphs, and tables to go where I want them AND STAY THERE! As a result, I've resorted to using frames. Frames, not text boxes. I paste the graphic or whatever into the frame, and then paste the caption that went with it. I prefer to generate the caption outside of the frame. Sometimes, captions are text boxes; sometimes, they are only text. I have the impression captioning within a frame generates the latter. I prefer text boxed captions. I seem not to have the time to conduct scientific experiments as I am busy throwing dishes and keyboards against the wall! Without frames, inserted objects (that's what I call them, God only knows what that term means only to MS Word!)... objects like pictures will go wild. To help control this behavior, I select the default layout for inserted objects to be "In Front of Text." This keeps the picture on the same page while I caption it, and then I transfer the picture and caption to the frame I prepared for it. Of course, I will choose whether to let the frame move with the text; usually I choose not to. This choice seems to work better on frames than it does on the objects when inserted directly into the document without a frame. I am soooo sick and tired of this. It's been going on since Windows 3.1! Recently, I rediscovered the MS newsgroups. So I am coming here to find out, hopefully, Ive been doing this wrong since forever. Someone please tell me, after all these years, what a dummy I am. Please tell me that there is such a simple way to these things: 1. Make inserted things go and stay where you want them, 2. Make captions so they renumber STRICKTLY in sequence based on their physical occurrence top-to-bottom and left-to-right. Thank you from the bottom of my dark brown coffee cup! -- Jim Rodgers ======================== Now, Ranting on the Side... ======================== I'm as a big an MS fan as there is. Been using MS products since I burned the 5k byte MS Basic interpreter into ROM on my 6502-based Kim-1 with S-100 bus!! I use MS Office exclusively over competitors, and ALWAYS have. So, I'm REALLY biting my tongue here about the usability and quality of design of MS Word. Is it not true? Is it not true that the objects and THE FORMATS OF TEXT all are anchored in the text stream? If you delete just one character and it's the right (wrong) one, the document will lose something major like a heading, or formatting for a whole chapter, or... well, haven't we all been there? In electrical engineering, we call that "in-band signaling." It generally recognized as the inferior choice if you have one. It would be great to know MS understood what a piece of junk they have here. One beautiful design change could bring enormous grace to this product. When I go on major consulting engagements, it is impossible to get most other consultants to do any major (long) document in Word; they always prefer FrameMaker®, which I hate. And I admit that when I am the one who is responsible for the documentation (sometimes, a thousand pages, outlined!), I go straight to Visual Basic to write the doc every time. I keep the text and drawings in an Access database, and the code inserts and formats everything for me in a few seconds. However, the automated approach is not practical when authoring a document from scratch €“ which is the 99.999% normal use for this product. |
#2
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Posted to microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs
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I can't dispel all your problems, but I can clear up one small part, I
think: Probably you know that graphics can be inserted either "In Line with Text" (in the text layer) or "wrapped" ("floating," in the drawing layer). When you select an inline graphic and use Insert | Caption (or Insert | Reference | Caption), you get a caption that is plain text (in the Caption style). If you select a wrapped graphic, you get a caption that is in a text box. This is ridiculously short-sighted of Word because text in a text box can't be "seen" by Word for purposes of creating cross-references or generating a Table of Figures. (And of course even you can see it only in Print Layout view, not in Normal view.) The solution to these problems is: 1. Always insert graphics inline whenever possible; format the paragraph the graphic is in (or the caption, whichever comes first) as "Keep with next." Sometimes it works well to insert the graphic and its caption together in a borderless table cell. 2. If you need text to wrap around your graphic, select both the inline graphic and its plain-text caption and insert both in a frame, then wrap the text around the frame. You don't have as many wrapping choices as with a text box, but it's unlikely you're going to want your figure to be in front of or behind text, so the basic "square" wrapping should suffice. 3. If you do put the graphic+caption in a frame, be aware that it is anchored to a text paragraph. Normally this will be the paragraph that precedes or follows it. You can move the anchor to another paragraph, and you can lock it to a specific paragraph. You can define the location of the graphic relative to the page rather than to the text it's anchored to. What you *can't* do is anchor it to a specific page: it will always appear on the same page as the text paragraph to which it's anchored. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Jim Rodgers" wrote in message ... I've used Word since [you] were born. And I've almost mastered it. I've even written code that "wrote" Word docs for me into the many hundreds of pages. But I've never been able to do certain basic things (except in VBA, sometimes). One of these is now eating my lunch: The doc is about 100pp. There are about three dozen figures, etc. (I caption all of them as "Figure.") These are the hassles: 1. I will insert a caption below a picture. It vanishes completely and forever. I never even see it the first time. However, it continues to increment the sequence number for the captions. I can't find it. GO TO does not even find the ones I can see! 2. Sometimes the caption sequence numbers get out of order. I have some tricks that sometimes work, but these are stupid ways to use my time. I bet I could write a code that could author this document, but isn't that even more ridiculous?!?!? So, how do I force these captions to renumber in order? Before you answer, read-on... 3. I've been through [way too much trouble] trying to get photos, graphs, and tables to go where I want them AND STAY THERE! As a result, I've resorted to using frames. Frames, not text boxes. I paste the graphic or whatever into the frame, and then paste the caption that went with it. I prefer to generate the caption outside of the frame. Sometimes, captions are text boxes; sometimes, they are only text. I have the impression captioning within a frame generates the latter. I prefer text boxed captions. I seem not to have the time to conduct scientific experiments as I am busy throwing dishes and keyboards against the wall! Without frames, inserted objects (that's what I call them, God only knows what that term means only to MS Word!)... objects like pictures will go wild. To help control this behavior, I select the default layout for inserted objects to be "In Front of Text." This keeps the picture on the same page while I caption it, and then I transfer the picture and caption to the frame I prepared for it. Of course, I will choose whether to let the frame move with the text; usually I choose not to. This choice seems to work better on frames than it does on the objects when inserted directly into the document without a frame. I am soooo sick and tired of this. It's been going on since Windows 3.1! Recently, I rediscovered the MS newsgroups. So I am coming here to find out, hopefully, Ive been doing this wrong since forever. Someone please tell me, after all these years, what a dummy I am. Please tell me that there is such a simple way to these things: 1. Make inserted things go and stay where you want them, 2. Make captions so they renumber STRICKTLY in sequence based on their physical occurrence top-to-bottom and left-to-right. Thank you from the bottom of my dark brown coffee cup! -- Jim Rodgers ======================== Now, Ranting on the Side... ======================== I'm as a big an MS fan as there is. Been using MS products since I burned the 5k byte MS Basic interpreter into ROM on my 6502-based Kim-1 with S-100 bus!! I use MS Office exclusively over competitors, and ALWAYS have. So, I'm REALLY biting my tongue here about the usability and quality of design of MS Word. Is it not true? Is it not true that the objects and THE FORMATS OF TEXT all are anchored in the text stream? If you delete just one character and it's the right (wrong) one, the document will lose something major like a heading, or formatting for a whole chapter, or... well, haven't we all been there? In electrical engineering, we call that "in-band signaling." It generally recognized as the inferior choice if you have one. It would be great to know MS understood what a piece of junk they have here. One beautiful design change could bring enormous grace to this product. When I go on major consulting engagements, it is impossible to get most other consultants to do any major (long) document in Word; they always prefer FrameMaker®, which I hate. And I admit that when I am the one who is responsible for the documentation (sometimes, a thousand pages, outlined!), I go straight to Visual Basic to write the doc every time. I keep the text and drawings in an Access database, and the code inserts and formats everything for me in a few seconds. However, the automated approach is not practical when authoring a document from scratch €“ which is the 99.999% normal use for this product. |
#3
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Posted to microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs
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Thanks for the prompt response!
Your point #3 was helpful. Thanks. Let me ask a more basic question to see if I can improve my conceptual model of the problem. If all my captions are in the main document text, then I know I can show the fields and toggle back and forth globally. Is there a way to update ALL fields in the [main] document globally? What about only the {SEQ} fields? What about the named fields {Seq Figure ...}? Thanks. -- Jim Rodgers "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote: I can't dispel all your problems, but I can clear up one small part, I think: Probably you know that graphics can be inserted either "In Line with Text" (in the text layer) or "wrapped" ("floating," in the drawing layer). When you select an inline graphic and use Insert | Caption (or Insert | Reference | Caption), you get a caption that is plain text (in the Caption style). If you select a wrapped graphic, you get a caption that is in a text box. This is ridiculously short-sighted of Word because text in a text box can't be "seen" by Word for purposes of creating cross-references or generating a Table of Figures. (And of course even you can see it only in Print Layout view, not in Normal view.) The solution to these problems is: 1. Always insert graphics inline whenever possible; format the paragraph the graphic is in (or the caption, whichever comes first) as "Keep with next." Sometimes it works well to insert the graphic and its caption together in a borderless table cell. 2. If you need text to wrap around your graphic, select both the inline graphic and its plain-text caption and insert both in a frame, then wrap the text around the frame. You don't have as many wrapping choices as with a text box, but it's unlikely you're going to want your figure to be in front of or behind text, so the basic "square" wrapping should suffice. 3. If you do put the graphic+caption in a frame, be aware that it is anchored to a text paragraph. Normally this will be the paragraph that precedes or follows it. You can move the anchor to another paragraph, and you can lock it to a specific paragraph. You can define the location of the graphic relative to the page rather than to the text it's anchored to. What you *can't* do is anchor it to a specific page: it will always appear on the same page as the text paragraph to which it's anchored. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Jim Rodgers" wrote in message ... I've used Word since [you] were born. And I've almost mastered it. I've even written code that "wrote" Word docs for me into the many hundreds of pages. But I've never been able to do certain basic things (except in VBA, sometimes). One of these is now eating my lunch: The doc is about 100pp. There are about three dozen figures, etc. (I caption all of them as "Figure.") These are the hassles: 1. I will insert a caption below a picture. It vanishes completely and forever. I never even see it the first time. However, it continues to increment the sequence number for the captions. I can't find it. GO TO does not even find the ones I can see! 2. Sometimes the caption sequence numbers get out of order. I have some tricks that sometimes work, but these are stupid ways to use my time. I bet I could write a code that could author this document, but isn't that even more ridiculous?!?!? So, how do I force these captions to renumber in order? Before you answer, read-on... 3. I've been through [way too much trouble] trying to get photos, graphs, and tables to go where I want them AND STAY THERE! As a result, I've resorted to using frames. Frames, not text boxes. I paste the graphic or whatever into the frame, and then paste the caption that went with it. I prefer to generate the caption outside of the frame. Sometimes, captions are text boxes; sometimes, they are only text. I have the impression captioning within a frame generates the latter. I prefer text boxed captions. I seem not to have the time to conduct scientific experiments as I am busy throwing dishes and keyboards against the wall! Without frames, inserted objects (that's what I call them, God only knows what that term means only to MS Word!)... objects like pictures will go wild. To help control this behavior, I select the default layout for inserted objects to be "In Front of Text." This keeps the picture on the same page while I caption it, and then I transfer the picture and caption to the frame I prepared for it. Of course, I will choose whether to let the frame move with the text; usually I choose not to. This choice seems to work better on frames than it does on the objects when inserted directly into the document without a frame. I am soooo sick and tired of this. It's been going on since Windows 3.1! Recently, I rediscovered the MS newsgroups. So I am coming here to find out, hopefully, Ive been doing this wrong since forever. Someone please tell me, after all these years, what a dummy I am. Please tell me that there is such a simple way to these things: 1. Make inserted things go and stay where you want them, 2. Make captions so they renumber STRICKTLY in sequence based on their physical occurrence top-to-bottom and left-to-right. Thank you from the bottom of my dark brown coffee cup! -- Jim Rodgers ======================== Now, Ranting on the Side... ======================== I'm as a big an MS fan as there is. Been using MS products since I burned the 5k byte MS Basic interpreter into ROM on my 6502-based Kim-1 with S-100 bus!! I use MS Office exclusively over competitors, and ALWAYS have. So, I'm REALLY biting my tongue here about the usability and quality of design of MS Word. Is it not true? Is it not true that the objects and THE FORMATS OF TEXT all are anchored in the text stream? If you delete just one character and it's the right (wrong) one, the document will lose something major like a heading, or formatting for a whole chapter, or... well, haven't we all been there? In electrical engineering, we call that "in-band signaling." It generally recognized as the inferior choice if you have one. It would be great to know MS understood what a piece of junk they have here. One beautiful design change could bring enormous grace to this product. When I go on major consulting engagements, it is impossible to get most other consultants to do any major (long) document in Word; they always prefer FrameMaker®, which I hate. And I admit that when I am the one who is responsible for the documentation (sometimes, a thousand pages, outlined!), I go straight to Visual Basic to write the doc every time. I keep the text and drawings in an Access database, and the code inserts and formats everything for me in a few seconds. However, the automated approach is not practical when authoring a document from scratch €“ which is the 99.999% normal use for this product. |
#4
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Posted to microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs
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And here's a really big problem right ow: I have two captions "missing."
Maybe thet are set Visible=False. I dunno. I just can't see them anywhere. So I go from "Figure 7." to "Figure 10." for no reason. Except that Iremember trying to insert those captions. Twice I tried to caption beneath a Figure that already was at the bottom of the page. Then, the captios went to Michael Jackson's house, and I never saw them again. I can't figure out the Object Model collection for these captions, or else I would fix this in VBA. Any help here? -- Jim "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote: I can't dispel all your problems, but I can clear up one small part, I think: Probably you know that graphics can be inserted either "In Line with Text" (in the text layer) or "wrapped" ("floating," in the drawing layer). When you select an inline graphic and use Insert | Caption (or Insert | Reference | Caption), you get a caption that is plain text (in the Caption style). If you select a wrapped graphic, you get a caption that is in a text box. This is ridiculously short-sighted of Word because text in a text box can't be "seen" by Word for purposes of creating cross-references or generating a Table of Figures. (And of course even you can see it only in Print Layout view, not in Normal view.) The solution to these problems is: 1. Always insert graphics inline whenever possible; format the paragraph the graphic is in (or the caption, whichever comes first) as "Keep with next." Sometimes it works well to insert the graphic and its caption together in a borderless table cell. 2. If you need text to wrap around your graphic, select both the inline graphic and its plain-text caption and insert both in a frame, then wrap the text around the frame. You don't have as many wrapping choices as with a text box, but it's unlikely you're going to want your figure to be in front of or behind text, so the basic "square" wrapping should suffice. 3. If you do put the graphic+caption in a frame, be aware that it is anchored to a text paragraph. Normally this will be the paragraph that precedes or follows it. You can move the anchor to another paragraph, and you can lock it to a specific paragraph. You can define the location of the graphic relative to the page rather than to the text it's anchored to. What you *can't* do is anchor it to a specific page: it will always appear on the same page as the text paragraph to which it's anchored. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Jim Rodgers" wrote in message ... I've used Word since [you] were born. And I've almost mastered it. I've even written code that "wrote" Word docs for me into the many hundreds of pages. But I've never been able to do certain basic things (except in VBA, sometimes). One of these is now eating my lunch: The doc is about 100pp. There are about three dozen figures, etc. (I caption all of them as "Figure.") These are the hassles: 1. I will insert a caption below a picture. It vanishes completely and forever. I never even see it the first time. However, it continues to increment the sequence number for the captions. I can't find it. GO TO does not even find the ones I can see! 2. Sometimes the caption sequence numbers get out of order. I have some tricks that sometimes work, but these are stupid ways to use my time. I bet I could write a code that could author this document, but isn't that even more ridiculous?!?!? So, how do I force these captions to renumber in order? Before you answer, read-on... 3. I've been through [way too much trouble] trying to get photos, graphs, and tables to go where I want them AND STAY THERE! As a result, I've resorted to using frames. Frames, not text boxes. I paste the graphic or whatever into the frame, and then paste the caption that went with it. I prefer to generate the caption outside of the frame. Sometimes, captions are text boxes; sometimes, they are only text. I have the impression captioning within a frame generates the latter. I prefer text boxed captions. I seem not to have the time to conduct scientific experiments as I am busy throwing dishes and keyboards against the wall! Without frames, inserted objects (that's what I call them, God only knows what that term means only to MS Word!)... objects like pictures will go wild. To help control this behavior, I select the default layout for inserted objects to be "In Front of Text." This keeps the picture on the same page while I caption it, and then I transfer the picture and caption to the frame I prepared for it. Of course, I will choose whether to let the frame move with the text; usually I choose not to. This choice seems to work better on frames than it does on the objects when inserted directly into the document without a frame. I am soooo sick and tired of this. It's been going on since Windows 3.1! Recently, I rediscovered the MS newsgroups. So I am coming here to find out, hopefully, Ive been doing this wrong since forever. Someone please tell me, after all these years, what a dummy I am. Please tell me that there is such a simple way to these things: 1. Make inserted things go and stay where you want them, 2. Make captions so they renumber STRICKTLY in sequence based on their physical occurrence top-to-bottom and left-to-right. Thank you from the bottom of my dark brown coffee cup! -- Jim Rodgers ======================== Now, Ranting on the Side... ======================== I'm as a big an MS fan as there is. Been using MS products since I burned the 5k byte MS Basic interpreter into ROM on my 6502-based Kim-1 with S-100 bus!! I use MS Office exclusively over competitors, and ALWAYS have. So, I'm REALLY biting my tongue here about the usability and quality of design of MS Word. Is it not true? Is it not true that the objects and THE FORMATS OF TEXT all are anchored in the text stream? If you delete just one character and it's the right (wrong) one, the document will lose something major like a heading, or formatting for a whole chapter, or... well, haven't we all been there? In electrical engineering, we call that "in-band signaling." It generally recognized as the inferior choice if you have one. It would be great to know MS understood what a piece of junk they have here. One beautiful design change could bring enormous grace to this product. When I go on major consulting engagements, it is impossible to get most other consultants to do any major (long) document in Word; they always prefer FrameMaker®, which I hate. And I admit that when I am the one who is responsible for the documentation (sometimes, a thousand pages, outlined!), I go straight to Visual Basic to write the doc every time. I keep the text and drawings in an Access database, and the code inserts and formats everything for me in a few seconds. However, the automated approach is not practical when authoring a document from scratch €“ which is the 99.999% normal use for this product. |
#5
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Posted to microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs
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Ctrl+A, Ctrl+9 should update all fields in the document body.
-- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Jim Rodgers" wrote in message ... Thanks for the prompt response! Your point #3 was helpful. Thanks. Let me ask a more basic question to see if I can improve my conceptual model of the problem. If all my captions are in the main document text, then I know I can show the fields and toggle back and forth globally. Is there a way to update ALL fields in the [main] document globally? What about only the {SEQ} fields? What about the named fields {Seq Figure ...}? Thanks. -- Jim Rodgers "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote: I can't dispel all your problems, but I can clear up one small part, I think: Probably you know that graphics can be inserted either "In Line with Text" (in the text layer) or "wrapped" ("floating," in the drawing layer). When you select an inline graphic and use Insert | Caption (or Insert | Reference | Caption), you get a caption that is plain text (in the Caption style). If you select a wrapped graphic, you get a caption that is in a text box. This is ridiculously short-sighted of Word because text in a text box can't be "seen" by Word for purposes of creating cross-references or generating a Table of Figures. (And of course even you can see it only in Print Layout view, not in Normal view.) The solution to these problems is: 1. Always insert graphics inline whenever possible; format the paragraph the graphic is in (or the caption, whichever comes first) as "Keep with next." Sometimes it works well to insert the graphic and its caption together in a borderless table cell. 2. If you need text to wrap around your graphic, select both the inline graphic and its plain-text caption and insert both in a frame, then wrap the text around the frame. You don't have as many wrapping choices as with a text box, but it's unlikely you're going to want your figure to be in front of or behind text, so the basic "square" wrapping should suffice. 3. If you do put the graphic+caption in a frame, be aware that it is anchored to a text paragraph. Normally this will be the paragraph that precedes or follows it. You can move the anchor to another paragraph, and you can lock it to a specific paragraph. You can define the location of the graphic relative to the page rather than to the text it's anchored to. What you *can't* do is anchor it to a specific page: it will always appear on the same page as the text paragraph to which it's anchored. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Jim Rodgers" wrote in message ... I've used Word since [you] were born. And I've almost mastered it. I've even written code that "wrote" Word docs for me into the many hundreds of pages. But I've never been able to do certain basic things (except in VBA, sometimes). One of these is now eating my lunch: The doc is about 100pp. There are about three dozen figures, etc. (I caption all of them as "Figure.") These are the hassles: 1. I will insert a caption below a picture. It vanishes completely and forever. I never even see it the first time. However, it continues to increment the sequence number for the captions. I can't find it. GO TO does not even find the ones I can see! 2. Sometimes the caption sequence numbers get out of order. I have some tricks that sometimes work, but these are stupid ways to use my time. I bet I could write a code that could author this document, but isn't that even more ridiculous?!?!? So, how do I force these captions to renumber in order? Before you answer, read-on... 3. I've been through [way too much trouble] trying to get photos, graphs, and tables to go where I want them AND STAY THERE! As a result, I've resorted to using frames. Frames, not text boxes. I paste the graphic or whatever into the frame, and then paste the caption that went with it. I prefer to generate the caption outside of the frame. Sometimes, captions are text boxes; sometimes, they are only text. I have the impression captioning within a frame generates the latter. I prefer text boxed captions. I seem not to have the time to conduct scientific experiments as I am busy throwing dishes and keyboards against the wall! Without frames, inserted objects (that's what I call them, God only knows what that term means only to MS Word!)... objects like pictures will go wild. To help control this behavior, I select the default layout for inserted objects to be "In Front of Text." This keeps the picture on the same page while I caption it, and then I transfer the picture and caption to the frame I prepared for it. Of course, I will choose whether to let the frame move with the text; usually I choose not to. This choice seems to work better on frames than it does on the objects when inserted directly into the document without a frame. I am soooo sick and tired of this. It's been going on since Windows 3.1! Recently, I rediscovered the MS newsgroups. So I am coming here to find out, hopefully, Ive been doing this wrong since forever. Someone please tell me, after all these years, what a dummy I am. Please tell me that there is such a simple way to these things: 1. Make inserted things go and stay where you want them, 2. Make captions so they renumber STRICKTLY in sequence based on their physical occurrence top-to-bottom and left-to-right. Thank you from the bottom of my dark brown coffee cup! -- Jim Rodgers ======================== Now, Ranting on the Side... ======================== I'm as a big an MS fan as there is. Been using MS products since I burned the 5k byte MS Basic interpreter into ROM on my 6502-based Kim-1 with S-100 bus!! I use MS Office exclusively over competitors, and ALWAYS have. So, I'm REALLY biting my tongue here about the usability and quality of design of MS Word. Is it not true? Is it not true that the objects and THE FORMATS OF TEXT all are anchored in the text stream? If you delete just one character and it's the right (wrong) one, the document will lose something major like a heading, or formatting for a whole chapter, or... well, haven't we all been there? In electrical engineering, we call that "in-band signaling." It generally recognized as the inferior choice if you have one. It would be great to know MS understood what a piece of junk they have here. One beautiful design change could bring enormous grace to this product. When I go on major consulting engagements, it is impossible to get most other consultants to do any major (long) document in Word; they always prefer FrameMaker®, which I hate. And I admit that when I am the one who is responsible for the documentation (sometimes, a thousand pages, outlined!), I go straight to Visual Basic to write the doc every time. I keep the text and drawings in an Access database, and the code inserts and formats everything for me in a few seconds. However, the automated approach is not practical when authoring a document from scratch €“ which is the 99.999% normal use for this product. |
#6
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Are you tracking changes? If so, numbering of any sort will not be correct
until you have accepted all the changes. I can't help with VBA aspects since I'm not a coder, but you might try asking in one of the word.vba. hierarchy of NGs (such as the one designated as "Programming" in this Communities interface). -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Jim Rodgers" wrote in message ... And here's a really big problem right ow: I have two captions "missing." Maybe thet are set Visible=False. I dunno. I just can't see them anywhere. So I go from "Figure 7." to "Figure 10." for no reason. Except that Iremember trying to insert those captions. Twice I tried to caption beneath a Figure that already was at the bottom of the page. Then, the captios went to Michael Jackson's house, and I never saw them again. I can't figure out the Object Model collection for these captions, or else I would fix this in VBA. Any help here? -- Jim "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote: I can't dispel all your problems, but I can clear up one small part, I think: Probably you know that graphics can be inserted either "In Line with Text" (in the text layer) or "wrapped" ("floating," in the drawing layer). When you select an inline graphic and use Insert | Caption (or Insert | Reference | Caption), you get a caption that is plain text (in the Caption style). If you select a wrapped graphic, you get a caption that is in a text box. This is ridiculously short-sighted of Word because text in a text box can't be "seen" by Word for purposes of creating cross-references or generating a Table of Figures. (And of course even you can see it only in Print Layout view, not in Normal view.) The solution to these problems is: 1. Always insert graphics inline whenever possible; format the paragraph the graphic is in (or the caption, whichever comes first) as "Keep with next." Sometimes it works well to insert the graphic and its caption together in a borderless table cell. 2. If you need text to wrap around your graphic, select both the inline graphic and its plain-text caption and insert both in a frame, then wrap the text around the frame. You don't have as many wrapping choices as with a text box, but it's unlikely you're going to want your figure to be in front of or behind text, so the basic "square" wrapping should suffice. 3. If you do put the graphic+caption in a frame, be aware that it is anchored to a text paragraph. Normally this will be the paragraph that precedes or follows it. You can move the anchor to another paragraph, and you can lock it to a specific paragraph. You can define the location of the graphic relative to the page rather than to the text it's anchored to. What you *can't* do is anchor it to a specific page: it will always appear on the same page as the text paragraph to which it's anchored. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Jim Rodgers" wrote in message ... I've used Word since [you] were born. And I've almost mastered it. I've even written code that "wrote" Word docs for me into the many hundreds of pages. But I've never been able to do certain basic things (except in VBA, sometimes). One of these is now eating my lunch: The doc is about 100pp. There are about three dozen figures, etc. (I caption all of them as "Figure.") These are the hassles: 1. I will insert a caption below a picture. It vanishes completely and forever. I never even see it the first time. However, it continues to increment the sequence number for the captions. I can't find it. GO TO does not even find the ones I can see! 2. Sometimes the caption sequence numbers get out of order. I have some tricks that sometimes work, but these are stupid ways to use my time. I bet I could write a code that could author this document, but isn't that even more ridiculous?!?!? So, how do I force these captions to renumber in order? Before you answer, read-on... 3. I've been through [way too much trouble] trying to get photos, graphs, and tables to go where I want them AND STAY THERE! As a result, I've resorted to using frames. Frames, not text boxes. I paste the graphic or whatever into the frame, and then paste the caption that went with it. I prefer to generate the caption outside of the frame. Sometimes, captions are text boxes; sometimes, they are only text. I have the impression captioning within a frame generates the latter. I prefer text boxed captions. I seem not to have the time to conduct scientific experiments as I am busy throwing dishes and keyboards against the wall! Without frames, inserted objects (that's what I call them, God only knows what that term means only to MS Word!)... objects like pictures will go wild. To help control this behavior, I select the default layout for inserted objects to be "In Front of Text." This keeps the picture on the same page while I caption it, and then I transfer the picture and caption to the frame I prepared for it. Of course, I will choose whether to let the frame move with the text; usually I choose not to. This choice seems to work better on frames than it does on the objects when inserted directly into the document without a frame. I am soooo sick and tired of this. It's been going on since Windows 3.1! Recently, I rediscovered the MS newsgroups. So I am coming here to find out, hopefully, Ive been doing this wrong since forever. Someone please tell me, after all these years, what a dummy I am. Please tell me that there is such a simple way to these things: 1. Make inserted things go and stay where you want them, 2. Make captions so they renumber STRICKTLY in sequence based on their physical occurrence top-to-bottom and left-to-right. Thank you from the bottom of my dark brown coffee cup! -- Jim Rodgers ======================== Now, Ranting on the Side... ======================== I'm as a big an MS fan as there is. Been using MS products since I burned the 5k byte MS Basic interpreter into ROM on my 6502-based Kim-1 with S-100 bus!! I use MS Office exclusively over competitors, and ALWAYS have. So, I'm REALLY biting my tongue here about the usability and quality of design of MS Word. Is it not true? Is it not true that the objects and THE FORMATS OF TEXT all are anchored in the text stream? If you delete just one character and it's the right (wrong) one, the document will lose something major like a heading, or formatting for a whole chapter, or... well, haven't we all been there? In electrical engineering, we call that "in-band signaling." It generally recognized as the inferior choice if you have one. It would be great to know MS understood what a piece of junk they have here. One beautiful design change could bring enormous grace to this product. When I go on major consulting engagements, it is impossible to get most other consultants to do any major (long) document in Word; they always prefer FrameMaker®, which I hate. And I admit that when I am the one who is responsible for the documentation (sometimes, a thousand pages, outlined!), I go straight to Visual Basic to write the doc every time. I keep the text and drawings in an Access database, and the code inserts and formats everything for me in a few seconds. However, the automated approach is not practical when authoring a document from scratch €“ which is the 99.999% normal use for this product. |
#7
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Posted to microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs
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![]() The Update method does not seem to work on fields embedded into frames. I have some which are inside text boxes which are then in frames as well. I can fix these manually for now. My REAL PROBLEM is I still have one caption inside a textbox, and it is "lost" somewhere in the document. Another MS Word feature! The text box may become visible or maybe even deleted if I cut several pages of text, then paste it into notepad to scrub it, and then copy and paste it back into MS Word. In fact, let me try that right now... ..... IT WORKED! ************* I had to do it twice before I cut and scrubbed enough text to accidentally on-purpose delete the phantom caption. And I never saw it in the process. But, it's gone finally. *** More *** So here's what I am doing now. Id anyone has a better way (not including ditching MS Word), then please explain it to me. 1. Open a blank sheet (new document) in Word. 2. Insert an embedded object or paste a copied object onto he blank page. 3. Format the Object (or whatever it is) using In Front of Text, Move with Text, Lock Anchor. 4. Select the object, go to the Insert Menu, and create a caption as required. This will create a textbox with a caption in it. 5. Format the caption textbox (right-click) and set it the same as you did the other object. 6. Back in the original document, insert a FRAME (not a textbox). Format the frame (different dialog box than the textboxes) for text wrap around, and set the distance from text=0. 7. Do not remove the border from the Frame yet. 8. Return to the "new doc" and select the object and the caption textbox together and right- click / copy. 9. Go back to the original doc and place the cursor in the Frame. Now do a Paste. Pasted items will NOT appear in Frame except by coincidence. 10. While the object and caption are still both selected, drag them into the Frame and align the top left corner. Leave about 0.1 to 0.2" margin between the objects and the Frame at the top left. 11. Now drag the bottom right corner of the Frame until it has the same margin as the top left do. 12. With the cursor, select the number field in the caption, then right click it, then choose Update Field in the Rclick menu. THAT's IT. Once you are 100% satisfied (which should be after you have completely written and proofed the whole document), then you may reformat the Frame so it has no border with right click / borders, etc. Also, this might be when you delete without saving the new doc / blank pages where you built the objects and captions and copied them to the Frames. =========== In my experience, you must update the Figure numbers manually, and the GOTO method in the Edit menu will not find these Fields. Also, one must take great care in pasting order. ....and where one pastes. These details will determine the sequence order of the caption numbers. |
#8
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Posted to microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs
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Note that (1) Word generally will NOT find text in a text box (to update it
or for any other purpose) and (2) you cannot insert a text box in a frame. What you have done is to anchor the text box to the paragraph in the frame and superimpose it over the frame. If you want to use a frame, just put plain text in it. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Jim Rodgers" wrote in message ... The Update method does not seem to work on fields embedded into frames. I have some which are inside text boxes which are then in frames as well. I can fix these manually for now. My REAL PROBLEM is I still have one caption inside a textbox, and it is "lost" somewhere in the document. Another MS Word feature! The text box may become visible or maybe even deleted if I cut several pages of text, then paste it into notepad to scrub it, and then copy and paste it back into MS Word. In fact, let me try that right now... .... IT WORKED! ************* I had to do it twice before I cut and scrubbed enough text to accidentally on-purpose delete the phantom caption. And I never saw it in the process. But, it's gone finally. *** More *** So here's what I am doing now. Id anyone has a better way (not including ditching MS Word), then please explain it to me. 1. Open a blank sheet (new document) in Word. 2. Insert an embedded object or paste a copied object onto he blank page. 3. Format the Object (or whatever it is) using In Front of Text, Move with Text, Lock Anchor. 4. Select the object, go to the Insert Menu, and create a caption as required. This will create a textbox with a caption in it. 5. Format the caption textbox (right-click) and set it the same as you did the other object. 6. Back in the original document, insert a FRAME (not a textbox). Format the frame (different dialog box than the textboxes) for text wrap around, and set the distance from text=0. 7. Do not remove the border from the Frame yet. 8. Return to the "new doc" and select the object and the caption textbox together and right- click / copy. 9. Go back to the original doc and place the cursor in the Frame. Now do a Paste. Pasted items will NOT appear in Frame except by coincidence. 10. While the object and caption are still both selected, drag them into the Frame and align the top left corner. Leave about 0.1 to 0.2" margin between the objects and the Frame at the top left. 11. Now drag the bottom right corner of the Frame until it has the same margin as the top left do. 12. With the cursor, select the number field in the caption, then right click it, then choose Update Field in the Rclick menu. THAT's IT. Once you are 100% satisfied (which should be after you have completely written and proofed the whole document), then you may reformat the Frame so it has no border with right click / borders, etc. Also, this might be when you delete without saving the new doc / blank pages where you built the objects and captions and copied them to the Frames. =========== In my experience, you must update the Figure numbers manually, and the GOTO method in the Edit menu will not find these Fields. Also, one must take great care in pasting order. ...and where one pastes. These details will determine the sequence order of the caption numbers. |
#9
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[quote=Suzanne S. Barnhill;226764]Ctrl+A, Ctrl+9 should update all fields in the document body.
-- Suzanne S. Barnhill I too have the problem that, apparently, a caption has gone to Michael Jackson's house -- and that the next image is then numbered incorrectly. I've tried using Ctrl+A, Ctrl+9, but this resulted in a formatting change in my document (the body of the text is controlled by a style that uses 11 pt font, and using Ctrl+9 changes it to 12 pt). I'm also using images inserted with the "in front of the text" wrapping as I don't understand how to use the inline wrapping and still place graphics the way I want to place them. However, that has not resulted in any general numbering problems -- nor has my using a frame (I'm assuming that's the name for the box that's inserted for self-generated drawings?) resulted in numbering problems. It's only several graphics further on that "insert caption" inserts a caption with a wrong number, and I believe that I might already have inserted that caption before but that it somehow went away -- probably to Michael Jackson's house ... I'd appreciate any helpful hints you might be able to give ... |
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