I know I don't use Word, but I know a lot of Word users, and therefore it may be worth mentioning that the cure for a lot of Word problems that do not respond to more obvious solutions is to "Maggie" the file. This method has been promoted by a lot of Word and Windows newsletters including Brian Livingston's Windows Secrets and Office Watch and is deceptively simple:
If you are having problems with a Word file, try Maggie-ing it, which is to set up a new file, then copy all the text from the old file, except for the final paragraph return.
The final return is the key to a lot of the formatting, and therefore to a lot of formatting problems.
The Maggie process is named after Maggie Secara, a copyeditor in the USA, and a very good editor that I'm pleased to have among my contacts for those seemingly unanswerable questions which every editor faces at some time. She is also an author of a major work on life in Elizabethan England - see http://compendium.elizabethan.org
Hi there, Gordon! :-) I suppose I should add that it was Steve Hudson who named the process after me. That was after a number of occasions when the Word gurus of the Word-PC list had struggled with several problems over several weeks, each time coming up with all sorts of complex and esoteric solutions that didn't work, only to have me say "Well did you do the thing where you copy everything but the last paragraph mark?" And it worked. I love a simple answer. Anyway, thanks for the shout-out,
Maggie
Posted by: Maggie Secara | July 17, 2009 at 11:30 PM