Cross References 1

Starting with an oldie but a goodie. In a nutshell, using cross-references in Microsoft Word is a bit like walking on eggs. They always break.

Problem existed since: Forever.
Last tried on: Word 2010.

Example 1

1. Type some text and press Enter.
2. Type more text and assign the style Heading 1.
3. Go to a new line.
4. Insert a cross-reference to the heading.
5. Pretend you want to update the heading text. Add a letter inside the heading.
6. Select all. Press F9.
   Cross-reference gets updated with the letter you added. This is good!
7. Pretend you want to add a word to the end of the Heading text. Go to the heading, tap End, type in something.
8. Select all. Press F9. 

Result: Cross reference doesn't update.

What happened? Never mind what happened. It didn't work as expected. Just wait. It's get better.

Example 2

1. Go to your heading text and press Home.
2. Press Ctrl-Enter (insert a page break).
3. Press Up key.
4. Type something.
5. Select all. Press F9.

Result: The cross-reference now includes your new text + page break + heading text. What happened? Never mind what happened. That's not what I intended!

Explanation

I could get into my suspicions about what is gong on here. Word is inserting some kind of special character that marks the start and stop of the reference. But who cares?

Workarounds

• Don't ever use Ctrl-Enter. Ever. Use Paragraph Properties > Page Break. It's cleaner.
• When adding text to the end of a heading (any heading, because how would you know that a certain heading is the target of a cross-reference?), position the Insertion Point between the second-to-last and the last character, and then start typing. Delete the last character after. Don't forget to the fix the previously-last word. Such a pain.

What I Want

What it comes down to is this: A paragraph should have unique ID. Inserting a cross-reference should target that unique ID. The cross-reference should automatically pick up all the paragraph's text. In all my years of technical writing, all my cross-references target the text of entire paragraphs. There is hardly ever never a time when I want to cross-reference just a portion of a text. There are milliions of times when I want to add text to the end of a heading. This is how FrameMaker works.

Request to Microsoft

Fix it!

About this Blog

As a technical writer, I'm an intense Microsoft Word user. It's one tool of many but the one I often have to return to, usually because I need to share files with others in the office. Otherwise I'm happy using DITA and associated editors like Oxygen, or FrameMaker, or anything else.

Writing being cathartic, and also as a way of trying to convince Microsoft to fix long-existing problems with Word, I start this blog. Please add your own whine suggestions below.