widows and orphans control does not seem to work

Here is what I did which finally worked.

It's lengthy, bear with me. (I use Word 2016, but had the same problem with earlier versions of Word.)

Here goes ...

Hit Ctrl + A  to select entire document

Go to Layout on top tool bar

In Layout select Paragraph

Once paragraph comes up, select Line and page breaks

Widow/Orphan control box should be filled in already. (With a blue or other colored square.) Click on it. This will put a check mark there. Click again to remove check mark. (Leave all other boxes alone.)

Now click Set on Default. (It’s on the same page as the last step you just did.)

You’ll get a question: All documents based on the normal template? Click on the little circle before this. Click okay.

You aren’t done yet.

Make sure your document is still highlighted. (Ctrl + A)

Go to Home on the top tool bar.

In Home select Paragraph.

Now do everything the exact same way again. (Look at my instructions above if confused.)

Here is what I figured out, at least for me, on my new laptop, Windows 7, Word 2016:

You need to set all these controls (for lack of better word) in both Layout AND Home

When I do all this, the entire document never changes and that stupid, pesky Widows and Orphan Control is shut down, not working, not functional, whatever. It’s a pain in the you-know-where, but it’s working, so far, for me.

As a diagnostic measure, switch to Draft View & observe whether the anomaly appears in that view. Then see if it persists/returns when you switch back to Page Layout View.

Since this is not occurring in all documents I tend to discount Preferences, corrupt Normal.dotm, or other causes of a global nature. It sounds as though it's more likely to be something specific about the documents where the issue is evident. Are these documents you created or were they received from another source? Some history on these errant files might shed some light on the issue, including what file format these documents are save in. I'm still puzzled about why you had to modify Normal to add Widow/Orphan Control, though.

The most obvious possible cause - which you already may have done - is to turn on the non-printing characters (¶) to see if there happens to be a ¶ at the end of the page preceding one of these orphans. I doubt this to be the case because the orphan atop the next page should display the indent if it were, but it bears checking - especially if others have worked with the file or if content has been copied/pasted from other sources. Along the same lines...

Confirm that Normal paragraph style is applied to the paragraphs where this is happening. Have you tried selecting an entire problem paragraph - including the ¶ at the end - then using Clear Formatting from the Styles palette & reapplying Normal style?

As a matter of routine I'd also suggest that you do some standard troubleshooting procedures:

1. Confirm all updates have been applied to Office & OS X
2. Repair Disk Permissions
3. Clear up font issues: **Font Weeding.**

You also might try Procedure #2 discussed on this web page to see if it may be a matter of corruption in the documents where this is happening:  Corrupt document

Regards,

Bob J.