MS Word + Booklet Template + Inserting Pages = HELP ME CLIPPY!

September 27, 2018 5:57 AM

So, I've been given the assignment to create a booklet that will be printed, spiral bound and given out to attendees of a training class. I found this Word document (Dropbox link) and I'm off to a good start, but I can't figure out how to add more pages to it and have it behave.

The template is set up with page numbers and a table of contents that I want to keep, but I cannot figure out how to add pages for more contents and have the page numbers update. The pages that I am adding need to be in a certain order, and I need to be able to see where they fall when they are printed.
I'm pretty good with Word, but this has me stumped because the document isn't reacting the way I thought it would when I insert a blank page.

Bonus issue: My current home printer doesn't print on both sides, so I'm going to have to figure out how to print single sided and see what the finished booklet will look like.

Thank you so much for your help!

posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: I'm not clear if it's both the TOC and the footer page numbers that are misbehaving for you, or just the footer page numbers. If it's only the latter, and if by any chance you're minimally familiar with the Python programming language, I recently had to look up how to add footer page numbers to an arbitrary .pdf automatically and found this article. If you search for the sentence "The goal now is to add a footer to an existing pdf file" there are a few dozen lines of code following it that do the numbering and all you have to do is change the .pdf file names.

So if you know how to set up and run that, you would delete the footer in MS Word, print your booklet out as a .pdf, and run the Python script on the .pdf to add the page numbers.

On the other hand, if even the TOC is broken, have you tried just starting from a completely blank Word document and adding in the TOC, footer, and other features and content you like from the template? In days of yore when I still used MS Word that was the sort of approach I used when something became bizarrely broken or misbehaving in the document I was working on. (This happened alot, which is why I switched to slightly more difficult but less temperamental ways of creating documents that better matched my own skill set.)
posted by XMLicious at 6:50 AM on September 27, 2018

Best answer: Do you have section breaks in the document? Word will sometimes start renumbering pages at the section breaks, I often fight this if I'm doing a couple of 2 column pages in a mostly 1 column document.

I've also been known to give up, manually hack the page count and TOC, convert everything to PDF, and insert the pages with the Preview app on a Mac.
posted by COD at 7:29 AM on September 27, 2018

Response by poster: Hey y'all!
Marking both as "Best" because I just had to give up trying to rig the existing document and start over from scratch, which is making life much easier. I was hoping for some sort of miracle shortcut, but as with life, sometimes that does not exist.
Thank you both for taking the time!
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 10:29 AM on September 27, 2018