I'm working with a document that has completely screwy section breaks. I can find and remove or change both continuous and next page section breaks, and if I add a section break, it shows up in the formatting as expected and the numbers adjust accordingly, so the basics seem to be working properly.
However, even when there is no section break apparent in the formatting, the header/footer section numbers skip forward every so often; sections 2 and 4 are on consecutive pages, and I can't find any formatting to explain it. Sections 13 and 30 are similarly connected.
I finally did a find and replace to remove ALL section breaks, planning to add back in the 2 sections I actually want. Word confirms it can't find any additional section breaks (either through advanced find and replace or through the "next section" button in the header/footer ribbon). Yet the footer on the last document page says section 45 and claims to be page 192 of a 137 page document. I scrolled back up a bit: document page 113 is in section 13, and document page 114 is in section 30. The revealed formatting shows only paragraph breaks, which I guess are somehow concealing 17 sections.
I really just need two sections–it does not need to be a complex document. But there's a lot of fine-tuned formatting already in place that I want to hold onto if I can.
Any Jedi section-break-revealing ideas?
Thank you!
Best Answer
Thanks to a comment about hidden text, I was reminded of a known problem with track changes and automatic ToC/ lists of tables: sometimes even if you are looking at the final version (no markup), it will skip some entries no matter how many times you redo the field codes, so a list of tables will include 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11. Once you accept all changes, if you autoupdate the list again, it will be correct.
With that in mind, I accepted all changes, and lo and behold the section breaks were corrected. I made no new changes, but the document structure finally reflected what the formatting codes said should have been there all along. There must be some logic as to which changes Word implements at which stage of the process, but it seems pretty arbitrary to me.
Thanks again!