[Jim Rodgers]

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.