Emily asked about a problem she was having with page references in indexes for a long document. It seems that when she inserted the index, some of the page numbers were off by one to three pages.
The first thing to check is your settings for hidden text in your document. When you insert index codes, they are inserted as fields with the hidden attribute applied to them. Word determines page counts based on what is visible on the screen, not necessarily on what is printed. Thus, you need to make sure that the display of hidden text is in sync with the printing of hidden text.
What happens if the settings aren't in sync? If hidden text is displayed (in other words, you can see the index entry codes, such as {XE "my indexed word"}), then the space taken by those visible codes are counted in the total page count. Over the course of a long document, this can affect pagination quite a bit. However, if Word is configured to not print hidden text, then the index page numbers—which are based on what is displayed, not what is printed—won't match the actual page numbers on the printout. (Remember that the display and the printing of hidden text are controlled independently of each other.)
The solution to this situation is fairly simple. All you need to do is follow these steps:
Figure 1. The display options of the Word Options dialog box.
Your index page numbers and your printing page numbers should now be in sync with each other. If they are not, then it could be that your document includes characters that, for whatever reason, can be displayed but cannot be printed. These would affect the displayed pagination—and thus the index page numbers—but not the printed pagination. You can discover if this is the case by carefully comparing your printout to what is displayed on your screen.
Finally, if these solutions still don't correct any page number disparities, it is possible that your document is corrupted in some way. This can occur in some documents, particularly documents that are used over the course of years and that had their roots in a different word processing program. You can try to open the file in WordPad and then use WordPad's Save As command to save the document back out. This will get rid of many of the advanced codes supported by Word but not by WordPad.
If the problem still persists, the only thing left to do is to get rid of all formatting and revert to plain text. Select all the text in the document (Ctrl+A), copy it (Ctrl+C), and paste it into a text editor such as Notepad. You can then copy it from within Notepad and paste it back into a new Word document. This process will get rid of any spurious formatting codes that may be corrupting the document. The only problem with such a drastic approach, of course, is that your document is now completely unformatted and you must reformat it and insert index codes all over again.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (9718) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Improper Index Page Numbers.
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2021-12-21 06:44:34
Tony Rudd
MS Word 2016 Index omits the associated page number for most index entries; this affects just one document
For one document the page number is almost always missing from the index. This seems to be document-relevant, because correct indexing is possible for other documents. The TOC page numbering is correct and page numbers are present on each page.
I have repaired (Open and Repair) the associated document and repaired MS Office 2016 - there was no improvement.
I have deleted (and recreated) the index - there was no improvement.
I saved the document in Word 2003 format and recreated the index - there was no improvement.
Is there anything else I can try?
(see Figure 1 below)
Figure 1. Screenshot
2019-05-16 19:21:15
Gary Jay
PS If I turn on "PRINT HIDDEN TEXT BOX" then when I create the PDF I see all the indexing within the document.
2019-05-16 19:18:11
Gary Jay
I need to have this clear... in your steps you note Make sure that both the Hidden Text and Show All Formatting Marks check boxes are cleared.Scroll down a bit further in the dialog box and make sure the Print Hidden Text check box is selected.
However, on the SCREEN Show All Formatting marks is still checked; and Print Hidden Text box isn't. Do I go by the instructions or the images.
I'm working on a 286 page book with footnotes and an index. The index is currently in the document but much of it needs to come out. I'm only hoping that the file isn't corrupted as I've put almost 40 hrs in this project already and I cannot change it to "plain text." I'm also working in 2016 MAC if that matters.
Please clarify. And if need be, I'll eliminate the entire index and start over with that (and it's a medical book so you can imagine).
2017-01-18 04:21:08
sujith
thank you very much for this valuable tip
2015-12-31 17:12:08
Crystal
Thank you so much! I couldn't figure out why my index page numbers were wrong after I converted my Word doc to PDF. This solved everything!
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