I work across different machines with different versions of Word. On one machine, when I update the cross references in a document, they lose the character formatting I’ve loving applied to make them stand out from the regular text (blue italic, if you’re asking). This doesn’t happen on the other machines – I’m not sure what the difference is, probably the version of Word or the OS. However, I have found a way to force cross reference formatting to be sticky, and that’s the topic of today’s post. Continue reading “Broken cross references in Word: Part 3”
Tag: Cross references
Broken cross-references in Word: Part 2
I find the behaviour of the Cross-reference dialog in Word occassionally flakey. Opening the dialog and inserting a cross-reference works fine, but sometimes on the second, or third, or some-random-number-th insert, you start getting references to different content than you selected for no obvious reason. Usually, closing and reopening the dialog makes it behave itself. However, exasperation with this intermittent unreliability led me to adapt my process for inserting cross-references with page numbers to halve the number of times I used the dialog. The method I now use is also far more reliable in ensuring that both elements of the cross-reference are pointing at the same destination (if the page number reference is targetting the wrong place, that’s not at all obvious when you do a global update of references). Continue reading “Broken cross-references in Word: Part 2”
Broken cross references in Word: Part 1
Here’s one every tech writer encounters sooner or later (usually sooner): you’re writing a document in Word, you insert a handy cross reference to a section title, you keep editing, you update your cross references, and all of a sudden half of your document is a mess of repeated text all over the place – gah! Continue reading “Broken cross references in Word: Part 1”