bookmarks got mixed up (word97)

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I created a bookmark for each heading 1 in my document by positioning the cursor in front of the first character of the heading and creating a hidden bookmark. I’m using these to link to chapter heads from Excel. I did one by highlighting the text, but the link from Excel didn’t work and some of the others that were done the way I first mentioned did work, so I did them all by just positioning the cursor.

One of the headings was renamed, and they had been alphabetically ordered, so I moved the chapter to where it belonged alphabetically. Silly me, I expected the bookmark to move with it. What happened instead was that all the links to bookmarks went to the wrong chapters (for that chapter and all the others, maybe since the renaming put the chapter at the beginning).

What should I have understood here? If I insert a chapter and a new bookmark, will all the bookmarks that follow the new one all be displaced? What if I delete a section? I know that if I go to a bookmark whose target has been deleted, it will go to the next bookmark. But if I remove the bookmark after removing the section, will the others still work?

I ask because I had to reset my links about seven times in Excel before I could get them all to work, so I’m not exactly sure what was causing my problems and whether I’m going to have problems again as soon as I do any updates to the Word document.

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Hi Wendy,

Bookmarks in Word are very easy to mix up or delete. That is because they can be overwritten or deleted when they are not shown on screen and deleting the contents of a bookmark deletes the bookmark as well.

You’ve confused the question somewhat (or at least confused me by asking what happens if you delete a section. Do you mean a word section or do you mean a portion of your text, perhaps including one of your headings?

You say that you know that if you delete a bookmark and try to link to it, it will simply go to the next bookmark. That is more than I know. In my experience, if the bookmark is missing, it goes to the beginning of the document, but I haven’t tried linking from Excel.

You could try linking to the hidden bookmarks that Word will insert if you insert a table of contents based on heading styles.

Otherwise, I would consider putting your bookmark after the first character of each header instead of before it. Remain aware of this when you make changes! A bookmark there is less susceptible to accidental deletion or being left behind when you insert or move sections.

Another thought would be to edit with display of bookmark delimiters turned on. If you put the macro shown at this post into your template, you can use it to give you the name of any bookmark(s) in a selection of text (or where the insertion point is).

You also might want to be asking your question in the Excel group.

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Hi Wendy,

This wouldn’t have anything to do with what we talked about on the Excel board about Word bookmarks, would it? I know that problem is solved , so now you just need a stable way in Word of moving bookmarked text around – right? So I think this is indeed an issue for the Word lounge.

Kind of following from what Charles said, you do have to be careful when moving the text. I tried using the bookmark at the beginning of the heading, as you had done. I then tried to move the heading in outline mode with just Show Heading 1 visible. I was able to move the text but NOT the bookmark. (Actually, I think I got one attempt of moving a heading with the bookmark at the beginning to work but there were a lot more failures.)

I tried what Charles suggested – putting the bookmark after the first character. That works as far as moving goes but it makes it difficult to edit the heading text – see comment below. But I think the message is that anywhere AFTER the first character would work.

So I tried putting the bookmark at the end of the heading text and before the para mark. This worked fine as far as moving the text goes. Depending on what you’re moving to where, you may have to create a blank heading (eg, moving a chapter to be last in the list). The bookmark follows along.

Anytime you edit bookmarked-text (whether the bookmark is at a location or of a selection), you have to be careful about editing the text. The steps I try to follow when editing bookmarked text are:
– never select the paragraph as a whole, select the text
– if I’m editing something that comes up to or includes the bookmark (either the location marker or the end-of-selection marker), add in an extra character. This has to be done BEFORE the character in front of the bookmark marker – I can’t insert a character just in front of the bookmark – it comes out after it. So if I have something like “Chapter 1]” where ] is a bookmark character symbol (you do work with them turned on, as Charles suggested, don’t you?), I’d put an extra character before the “1”.
– now you can select the text up to and including the character you inserted, type your new text, and delete what used to be the last character of the old heading

When you go to move your heading, the bookmark comes with it.

Now here’s some good news. I had bookmarks at the beginning of the heading that I was linking to from my Excel spreadsheet. In Word, I
– positioned the insertion point at the end of the heading
– went into the Bookmark dialog
– deleted the bookmark (say it was called “Internet_Chapter”), which deletes the existing bookmark
– immediately added the same bookmark “Internet_Chapter”, which is now positioned at the end of the heading, and exited the dialog

Went back into Excel and clicked on my links. Word opened up right to the new location for the bookmark. Excel never knew about the switch.

Now if you can only get Excel to work. Or was part of your changing your bookmark approach from selected text to location needed to make Excel work? That would be interesting to know.

Fred

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Three totally useful great replies. I’ll put all my responses in this one posting, since Fred has followed me and this problem around from Excel to here, and you’re exactly right, Fred, that now I’m just worried about maintenance down the road in the Word doc.

Sorry to confuse you Charles – I didn’t mean Word sections but rather what you suspected. Howard and Fred, I understand now why the bookmarks hadn’t moved, though I moved the chapters in outline view so I hadn’t thought that could pick up the text without the bookmark. Wrongo. And yes, yesterday I just learned (from another posting, I think) about showing bookmarks and how to know the name. I have the bookmark names in the chapter names to make it easy to know where to find the corresponding Word chapter from Excel, so I don’t require a macro in this case (and someone mentioned some character combo to display the bookmark name, which I’ll look up when I need it – archives are so useful).

Charles, I suppose it was also because of the bookmarks’ being ahead of the heading text that they were not deleted when the chapters were deleted, but they were still there and Going to them went to other chapter headings. In the new position, the bookmarks are deleted when the chapters are deleted.

Fred, I think I’ve done what you suggested about moving the bookmark to the end of the heading text, followed by a space. When you say you need to be careful, you mean careful not to inadvertently delete the bookmark? I’ve put them in as, for example,
2. ACTIVITY_CODES – New Activity Codes ]
followed by the paragraph mark (] is the bookmark). I have to hope that the extra space doesn’t push a heading to a new line in the table of contents! You were all correct- in this position, the bookmarks moved when the chapters were moved.

Fred, re your last question, when the links weren’t working, I noticed that one of the non-working ones showed a whole word as the bookmark and that it was different from the others. When I changed it to just the position in front of the text, it started working. That could, of course, be totally a red herring. I have no idea what made things start working. Your faith that they could, probably. I may have originally just not wanted the text bookmarked so I could copy it and paste it elsewhere. It’s a year ago now and I don’t remember.

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Hi Wendy,

A few things but most importantly, it sounds like you have your Excel-Word linking/bookmarking working.

1. the key for showing the bookmark name is CTRL+SHFT+F5. If your insertion point is “near” (certainly selecting) the bookmark, then the key combo will open the Insert Bookmark dialog and highlight the bookmark in question (as well as have it on the top Bookmark Name line). Not pretty but it works. This came from the lounge. At the time, there were a lot of other postings in the thread of macros that probably do it nicer. However, a few tests show that “near” is not very reliable – better to have it selected.

2. It looks like a space after your last character works fine and doesn’t mess up the TOC (if you do your TOC’s with leaders, you’ll see it’s ok). To change the heading text, you’d select everything up to, but not including, the space. I usually don’t bookmark headings (or other things at the end of a para) so don’t have the luxury of putting in an extra space. But that sounds like a great solution for a bookmark at the end of a para.

3. You don’t even have to delete the old bookmark before adding the new one by the same name. I positioned the insertion point to where I wanted my “Internet_chapter” bookmark to be, went into the Bookmark dialog. If the bookmark I wanted to change was already selected, just click Add; if not, just select the one you want to add. In either case, the one you want is now on the Bookmark Name line at the top. Click Add and the location of the bookmark is moved to where the insertion point is currently.

And while we’re at it, the CTRL+SHIFT+F5 is a shortcut for bringing up the Bookmark Dialog, even tho this is NOT shown on the Insert menu.

Now just don’t upgrade to 2000. As I said, putting in the bookmark as part of the Excel hyperlink is a pain. Maybe XP is better.

Fred

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Fred, thanks for your last posting. I wish I had been busier and not got around to updating the document already – I’d have saved some time on both the advice to not bother deleting the old bookmarks and on using the shortcut keys. I don’t know whether I’m pleased or not to now be such an expert on redoing bookmarks! I was totally surprised about being able to just move the bookmarks by setting a new one of the same name.

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Hi Wendy,

>>I was totally surprised about being able to just move the bookmarks by setting a new one of the same name.

Me too. Sorry about that. Now that could be due to the fact that this experiment was run from my Office 2000 setup here. I thought using an existing bookmark-name at a new location generated a msg. Maybe that’s Word 97 or older. Hopefully you didn’t have too many chapters.

Anyway, now you’re the bookmark b…

Fred

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Each bookmark in a document is independent of all other bookmarks in a document.

If you move the entire text covered by a bookmark, then the bookmark moves with the text.

If you created a bookmark in fron of the text in a paragraph, that bookmark does not cover any text. So it does not get moved if you move ONLY the text of the paragraph. You’d have to move the whole paragraph.

I have shareware macros to solve this problem, but I doubt that I’ll live long enough to ever release them.

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