Hi,

I'm using Microsoft Office 2003 -- more specifically the Word part of the package. I'm having hassles with different aspects of it and for the life of me I can't get around them.

I have a large document (300+ pages) and because it's not in its final form I put a watermark in it to let me know things are pending, however I was under the impression that if I put in a watermark (or page numbers) that it would do the entire document, however, as I was going through the document I noticed that the watermark wasn't in the background on the first 100 + pages, so I put a watermark in again only to find that this time it only did page 1 to 280 (instead of going to 363). I successfully removed the last watermark I put in but I can't get rid of the original watermark.

I find I have the same problem with page numbering and have gone through the document several times, page by page, to get rid of things in the footer, but it has NOT solved the problem. I can't get the pages numbered correctly.

Have you any ideas as to what I can do to correct these annoying hassles?

(Originally posted December 2005)

Thanks

Phil Goodwin, Bowral, NSW

I think you're falling foul of a feature in Word that lets you configure different headers and footers for different sections of a document. In your case you don't want this to occur but you're getting it anyway. The solution is to locate and fix up all the sections in your document. To do this, choose Edit, Find and in the Find What box type ^b. Now choose Find Next. This locates the first section break in the document which you can view by clicking the Show/Hide button on the Standard toolbar. If you don't really need a section break, remove it by deleting it. If you need a new page but not a new section, press Ctrl+Enter instead to create it.

Ideally if you don't need sections you should remove all of them. You'll know how many you have because, the second item on the Word status bar tells you how many sections you have – if you don't need any it should read Sec 1 when you're on the last page of the document and when you've stripped them all out.

If you do really need to have multiple sections, at each point when a new section starts, choose View, Header and Footer, and click the Same as previous button on the Header and Footer toolbar for both the Header and the Footer. You can tell the section header you're working on as the text above the header has the section number in it. When you're done, create your header and footer text and page numbers and watermark and they will be applied automatically to all pages in the document. Of course, before you start work on this project, make sure you have a back up of this file won't you?

Helen Bradley