Widow/Orphan not working (Word 2000)

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I have a document set up with Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 styles. Each style contains Widow/Orphan control under the Line and Page Breaks tab. But as I paginate through the document, Word is ignoring the setting in all three styles. I’m getting both widow lines and orphan lines at various spots. There’s no direct formatting applied to any paragraphs where these widow or orphan lines are occurring.

Any idea what’s causing this? This is the first time I’ve seen this in a document. Does Word somehow think it’s a Web-based document, in which case pagination controls are not valid?

Is there some underlying setting (i.e., some kind of Option or customizable feature) that regulates Widow/Orphan control that might be the problem? I know in WordPerfect, for example, you can specify how many lines you want Widow/Orphan control to hold together.

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Russ,

Not sure, but possibly if these paragraphs are also set to keep with next paragraph, that might throw off the widow/orphan control… (?)…

Gary

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Gary, thanks for the response. No, none of the paragraphs or styles have Keep with Next activated. In fact, the only item checked under Line and Page Breaks is Widow/Orphan. –Russ

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Can I just check your definition of widows and orphans? Because as I understand it, these are the first and last lines of a multi-line paragraph, and become so when the first is at the bottom of a page or the last at the top of one – neither of which would apply to headings, which are usually one line.

If you want to stop headings being separated from their adjacent text, you need to use the ‘Keep text together’ and/or ‘Keep with next’ options. Also, if there is a blank line between the heading and its text you might want to consider putting ‘space after’ (in Format, Style, [stylename], modify, paragraph, space after) instead of a blank line, as the ‘keep with …’ options can otherwise ‘keep with’ the blank line only and still let the text go on a different page.

HTH

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Let me clarify Beryl’s answer a bit. If you have a one-line heading, “Keep Lines Together” will not help you at all. The purpose of “Keep Lines Together” is to keep an entire paragraph on one page – it says “do not let the page break anywhere within this paragraph”. If you have a one line paragraph, there are not lines to keep together. “Keep With Next” is the choice that you want to keep a one line heading paragraph from separating from the following paragraph. “Keep With Next” says “do not let the page break at the end of this paragraph”. These two commands are commonly misunderstood and misused – I think a lot of people find the two confusing.

Lee Morgan

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Thanks, Lee. I agree that Keep With Next and Keep Lines Together are commonly misunderstood. It took me a while to learn the difference. One feature I like along those same lines is the Line Break, which when used with Keep Lines Together, lets you hold together things like address blocks or signature blocks. –Russ

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Thanks, Beryl. Yes, what I mean by my description is that in some cases the first line of a multi-line paragraph is being split off from the rest of the paragraph and in other cases the last line is being split off. These are all multi-line paragraphs, not single-line headings. And I do have the “Line After” set at “12” to give me a built-in blank line following each paragraph. My single-line headings all have the Line After of 12 as well, plus they have Keep with Next to prevent the heading from being split off from the paragraph that follows it. (But those headings are not involved in my current problem. What I’m having trouble with is the multi-line paragraphs.)

Russ

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That would be where the confusion arises – in your initial posts you talked about H1, H2 and H3 styles, not the paragraph ones.

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Sorry for the confusion, Beryl. The H1, H2 and H3 styles are the paragraph styles. The H1 paragraph has a section number (e.g., “1.”) followed by an underlined title, followed by one or more sentences of text. The H2 paragraph has a section number (e.g., “(a)”) followed by one or more sentences. The H3 paragraph has a section number (e.g., “(i)”) followed by one or more sentences.

(Note that not all of the H1 paragraphs have text following the title. Some consist of just the title. But the ones where I’m having the problem are the kind that have text following. Those are toward the end of the document.)

I’m going to try to attach the file to Lee’s answer below. (I say try because I’ve never done it before, but I think I can do it. Wish me luck!)

Russ

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Russ,

My experience with odd little problems like this is that I can solve them better if I get my hands into the document. Would it be possible to post a copy?

Lee Morgan

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Great idea, Lee. As I told Beryl, I’m going to try to attach it. I reduced the size of the document to make it easier to deal with, but there are still two spots where the Widow/Orphan problem exists: At the top of page 6 and the top of page 12 there is a single line that has been split off from the rest of its paragraph.

Russ

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Russ –

As I suspected, it was something quirky. If you’ll open the document, go into the print layout view, and turn on the show/hide button so you can see paragraph marks, you’ll see that there’s an odd paragraph mark just above the footer which is grayed out. Go to View/Header and Footer, move to the footer and click on that paragraph mark and you’ll see that it’s in a frame. Right-click on the frame and choose cut from the right-click menu. The other oddness is that the page number in the footer is truncated. Select everything in the footer and do Control/Q to remove any directly applied paragraph formatting and that problem will disappear. Once you do these two things, your Widow/Orphan control problem should be solved. I’ve attached a copy of your document where I did this and with a quick run-through, I didn’t see any single lines.

Lee Morgan

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Wow, thanks, Lee. I haven’t had time yet to try what you said, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do. I hope I’ll have a chance tomorrow. –Russ

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Lee, I went through the steps you suggested and they worked. Thank you so much for staying with me this long to solve it. What I don’t understand is why those elements would affect Widow/Orphan control. Do you have any idea? –Russ

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You’re very welcome – I’m glad I could help. I don’t know why specifically a frame in a footer would affect Widow/Orphan control. I do know from experience that frames in footers, when located outside the footer area as this one was, can cause real problems with pagination. As soon as I went into the footer and saw it, I was pretty sure it was the root of your problem.

Lee Morgan

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You can be sure I’ll remember this, Lee. It’s episodes like this that add up to a practical knowledge of a program. You don’t find solutions like this in books–only from the trenches.

The two law firms I’ve been with for the last 11 years have used WordPerfect, so Word is relatively new to me. However, because of the Internet and file exchange, many firms are actually switching to Word entirely. Our firm is now a “dual” shop, but eventually the tide may sweep us entirely into the Word camp.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more questions as they come up. Thanks again for your generous help.

Russ

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Russ –

I work for a law firm that made the switch from WP to Word about four years ago. Let me give you some advice. 1) Learn everything you can about the structure of Word. Check out one of Charles Kenyon’s posts with links to sites about Word – there’s a lot of valuable information there. 2) Learn everything you can about document conversion. Don’t assume that simply opening a WP document in Word and starting in to work on it is okay. Do not underestimate the importance or the complexity of the differences between the two programs. Check out http://www.microsystems.com. 3) Push styles in Word. WP users don’t like styles and are very resistant to using them, but they are absolutely the way to structure your documents. Again, Charles’ posts have some great information about styles. 4) Do everything you can to encourage a move to one word processing program. Round-tripping documents between WP and Word can quickly create disasters. 5) Emphasize to your users that they simply cannot think of Word and WP as being in any way similar. If they try to use Word the way they used WP (read: the way they used their typewriters), they’re going to be setting themselves up for document corruption and disaster. 6) Look into a program called DocXTools for document conversion and cleanup. Microsystems makes it. Purchasing that was the best thing my firm ever did to help us convert and clean up documents.

All this is from cold, hard experience. Here’s hoping your experience in making this switch will be easier than ours was.

Lee Morgan

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Lee,

Your advice is all well-taken. I’ve been through a lot already, both at my prior firm, which was in the middle of planning a conversion to Word when it went out of business, and at my new firm, which knows very little about the program. I’m actually considered the authority around here (the new firm), even though my experience is relatively limited. I’ve learned loads about Word just by people asking me questions and trying to find the answers.

As you say, the two programs (WordPerfect and Word) are apples and oranges. Word’s modular structure as opposed to the linearity of WordPerfect make them as incompatible as you can get. The baptism WordPerfect users get is truly one by fire–more like inferno. In my firm, we don’t do much converting from one program to the other, and if we do, we always do a Paste Special with the unformatted text option, then reconstruct the formatting in the new program. As we all know, any other method is not viable.

We do have the DocXTools and I’ve used them a little, but I don’t really know how to use them properly. I assume there are help screens that will explain a lot. We’ve been extremely busy around here for a long time, so I don’t get much time to spend teaching myself things like that.

I agree that styles are the only way to go. But most of the documents we get from clients don’t use them, which is understandable since most of those folks are word processing novices. That’s one of my biggest gripes about Word–in order to use it properly, you nearly have to be an expert user. It doesn’t lend itself to use by several levels of ability like WordPerfect does. Attorneys trying to draft a document from scratch usually end up setting it up badly, then maybe a secretary who gets it after that tries to do a little more, but since secretaries tend not to be expert enough to use styles properly, the bad formatting escalates, then by the time the word processors get it, the document really needs to be re-setup entirely. Then if a secretary has to make additions after that, she doesn’t know what to do with the advanced style setup, so she tries to add a section manually, which usually doesn’t work, and on and on. You know what I mean. One of the most-heard phrases among the word processors here is “I hate Word.” The reality of the world is that non-experts are going to be working on documents from time to time, which with Word can cause all kinds of havoc.

If you have any calming words of advice, I could use some. I believe many hours of work are wasted trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

Again, thanks so much for your generous help and the amount of time you’ve spent with me. It’s obvious you enjoy helping people. I feel the same way and get all kinds of good feelings from bailing my co-workers out of their word processing jams.

Russ

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Russ,

The pain you describe can be greatly minimized if you can get your firm to adopt a firmwide approach to producing Word documents – this involves the use of templates for various types of document requirements, all of which enforce the global “firm style” – mainly by sharing the same set of styles across all templates.

Then all users (attorneys, secys, wp ops) get sufficient training so that they know how to use the firm templates and the firm styles.

It’s not the kind of thing you can build casually, but once you put it into place, it minimizes (but not eliminates – users being users, and Word being Word) a lot of the headaches you’re referring to.

Gary

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Thank you, Gary. –Russ

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Not directly related to the widow/orphan question but you might want to take a look at the following: Word and Word Perfect work very differently from one another. Each program’s methods have strengths and weaknesses, but if you try to use one of these programs as if it were the other, it is like pushing on a string! You can easily make a lot of extra work for yourself. If you are unwilling to take the time to learn to use Word’s methods, you should stick to using Word Pad. You’ll have a lot less grief, although you’ll miss out on a lot of raw power.

See Word for Word Perfect Users (addbalance.com/word/wordperfect.htm)
Word Perfect compared to Word (mvps.org/word/FAQs/)
Tips and Gotchas (mvps.org/word/FAQs/)
Does Word Have Reveal Codes? (mvps.org/word/FAQs/)
Word Perfect to Word Converters and Why None of Them Are Perfect
Converting Documents from Word Perfect to Word
for information on Word for Word Perfect users.

For more:
How to Create a Template (Part 1) (mvps.org/word/FAQs/)
How to Create a Template (Part 2) – download the Word version which includes a template built the way the tutorial describes. It is a work of art. (mvps.org/word/FAQs/)
Word’s Numbering Explained by John McGhie (mvps.org/word/FAQs/)
Understanding Styles (addbalance.com/usersguide/styles.htm)

In Word 2000 or later you can get the function keys to display in a special toolbar at the bottom of the screen if you want (something like pressing F3 twice in WP). The following macro will do this.

Sub ShowMeFunctionKeys()
Commandbars(“Function Key Display”).Visible = True
End Sub

Learn about Styles – really learn! I resisted for years and now regret every day of those years because although that string was still very hard to push, it kept getting longer and longer, and had some very important projects tied to it! Once you understand styles and the Word concept of organizing things into Chinese boxes everything falls into place and instead of pushing a string, you can push a button that turns on the very powerful text processing machine known as Microsoft Word and it will start doing your work for you instead of running around behind you trying to undo what you just thought you did.

So much for my rant.

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Charles,

Sorry for the delay in responding. Today is my first day back in the office after being out for Christmas.

Thanks for the many links and words of advice and help. I’ll take a look at them. Yes, Word and WordPerfect couldn’t be more different from each other. I feel fairly comfortable with styles now, but looking back to when I was first given a Word document to revise (about three years ago), I wonder how I ever made it through. The program is not in any way intuitive and I simply could not figure out what was going on. I made it my business to get a book and give myself a crash course. Only then did I realize that knowing WordPerfect wasn’t much help. But there is a lot of power in Word once you know how to use it.

Russ

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