Cross References Won’t Update Correctly (W2000)

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I have created a document and inserted three pictures that have Captions, Fig 1, Fig 2 and Fig 3 (Inserted by Insert/Caption)

Later in the document I have a piece of text that I want to cross reference to Fig 1 (I am only asking it to show “See Fig1”).

If Fig1 is deleted and the other Caption fields updates so Fig2 becomes Fig1 and so on, the piece of text that is cross referenced does not update. If you click on the X-ref it goes to a heading or If you try to update the x-ref, the field code shows “Error – Reference Source Not found”

What am I doing wrong?

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What behaviour do you want when you have a cross reference to a caption that has been deleted?

StuartR

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When you click on the X-ref it hyperlinks to Fig1. After I deleted Fig1 and updated the Fields so the Figures would be numbered correctly, I would have thought that when clicking on the x-ref it would hyperlink to the new Fig1. I can understand if I deleted Fig1 and didn’t update fields that it wouldn’t have anything to reference to. I assumed that if a an item is x-ref’d to Fig1 Word will look for anything that has been captioned Fig1.

But you know what happens if you assume

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The purpose of a cross reference is that it points to the same place, regardless of you adding or removing other things elsewhere in the document.

If you insert a cross reference to Figure 1 and then add two more figures in front of it, then the cross reference will continue to point to the same place in the document, but it will update to say “See Figure 3”. If you want it to say “See Figure 1” all the time then you just need to insert the text “See Figure 1” without using a cross reference.

If you also want to have a hyperlink then you need to select a suitable target, something that won’t get deleted, you can then select the “See Figure 1” text and use the Hyperlink button to insert your link.

StuartR

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Hetty,

When you cross reference – you refer to something that is known as a “target” – in this case the Figure 1.

Once you delete the target, it can’t be found by the reference – hence the error.

Hope this helps!

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