An MS Word 2000 question

Factual Questions
1

Word 2000, and all other versions of Word I’ve encountered, does this thing where, if you check the paragraph box so that you can see things like spaces, discretionary hyphens, and other non-printing characters–Word’s version of Reveal Codes–it actuallly changes the page setup for whatever you’re looking at. For instance if you run a table of contents with this turned on, you will get different page numbers than if you turn it off first.

This seems to me like a bug. Is it different in any of the more advanced MS Word products?

I am using Word 2000 because that is the one my office “supports”–in quotations because I am, sadly, the office “expert” and there’s lots I don’t know. This is undoubtedly because we don’t want to spend the $$ to update 120 computers. But I’m a heavy user (that’s why I’m the “expert”) and they might update the version used by me, and the rest of the editorial department, if there was a benefit. Having the correct page numbers would be a benefit. There might be others. (On the whole, I’m happy enough with the program, and I say that as a person who could have used WordPerfect 5.1+ for the rest of my life.)

2

I use Word 2003 and I’ve never seen this happen. I just double-checked by going to a 13-chapter, 300-page document and clicking “Show/Hide” on and off. The pagination never changed no matter how many times I updated the ToC.

3

I have used every version of Word from Word for DOS in 1980 up to Word 2003 and I have never seen this happen, and I always configure mine to show paragraph marks and tabs.

(This is not really like WordPerfect “reveal codes” in that you don’t see all the formatting marks, just a few characters that are not otherwise visible.)

4

I am doing this wrong, then. I open the file. I click the paragraph symbol. I use the Go To command to Go To page 990. That’s the page I get.

Then I click the paragraph symbol off. I am now on page 983. If GOTO page 990, I go to a different page.

If I am on page 990 with the paragraphs on, and try to print page, it prints page 983.

Do I have something set up wrong? (Yes, it is a big file.)

5

My Goto takes me to the same pages back and forth no matter whether Show/Hide is on or off.

It might be the size of your file that’s screwing it up somehow. I just did a find and replace and replaced every paragraph mark with a page break. That created a 3260-page document. Sure enough, the Goto goes to the wrong pages. But it goes to the same wrong pages either way. Show/Hide isn’t a factor.

Number of pages would seem to have a limit for accurate Goto searching. But that seems to be a bug in Goto rather than in the underlying structure.

I never use Goto, so maybe that’s the simplest cure.

6

Just to set the record straight, that was 1990.