Ref Not Found – Ignore when Printing

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I have been given several large documents to tidy up. They have References to Bookmarks and a Table of Contents within them. Unfortunately the person who edited them does not understand how these functions work and has made changes to the documents. Naturally when she prints the document all the changed references appear as Error! Reference Not Found.

It would take me a month of Sundays to edit them and it is not important in the electronic version. The printed version is what is to be presented to the big wigs.

How can I by pass the the Error message showing on the printed version?

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Hi Kerry,

You’re caught between a rock and a hard place, so to speak.

You could turn of the ‘update fields before printing’ setting but, if the references remain without the updating, presumably some, at least, will be wrong. And, if the fields have alrady been updated, the ‘Error! Reference Not Found’ results are going to be there anyway – there might also be other references that update but are invalid because the editing has errantly changed what they refer to. Conversely, if you let the fields update, you’re guaranteed to get the ‘Error! Reference Not Found’ for all the missing ones and the risk of others being invalid.

And, although you could convert all fields to text, and use Find/Replace to delete the ‘Error! Reference Not Found’ messages, that would leave referencing holes throughout the document – and it wouldn’t address the issue of potentially invalid cross-references.

If you’ve still got the original, you might find it helpful to use Word’s ‘merge documents’ function to create a third document containing all the changes. You could then use that as a guide to incorporating the desired changes into the original document – without destroying the referencing.

Whatever course you take, time and patience will be needed.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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