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In Microsoft Word 365, I have an occasional issue with documents where when I input "Section Break (Next Page)" Microsoft Word is changing it to "Section Break (Even Page)" or "Section Break (Odd Page)." It does not always happen, but happens frequently. Often, when I correct this other section breaks in the document that I have not changed are then changed as well, which also changes a lot of the formatting of the document. Typically, if I just keep going back and changing this--within 3-5 times it will start working correctly, even though I am just doing the exact same thing. Occasionally, it takes 8-10 times. As this has been happening occasionally for years with Microsoft Word, I have been able to being "testing" how to fix it. I have made sure to replicate doing the exact same thing when correcting in (not deleting extra lines, etc.). It does seem rather random that if I do the exact same thing enough times it seems to start working correctly again, though sometimes returns to doing the same thing later.
Although I have always eventually been able to get this to work, it often takes a couple of hours to get it to work and correct all the formatting changes that have happened due to this, particularly changes in headings (this normally happens when editing books that have different chapter headings). I have contacted Microsoft about this a few times over the years and have not found a solution yet. Over time I have updated my computer (on 3rd or 4th computer since first encountering this) and upgraded to Office 365 with updating it regularly. The problem persists.
Anyone know why this is happening or solutions to help prevent this in the future?
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
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Answer accepted by question author
That's a long-standing bug in Word for Mac and Windows. But it has an easy fix.
Answer accepted by question author
To add to what John has said, at least on Windows, the purpose of the section break may be relevant. For example, if you added a Next Page section break and changed the page orientation, the printer may force an Odd Page section break, if the printer won't support printing layout and landscape on the same sheet of paper.
Hi LH_editor,
If you still need help about your Word document section break issue, please feel free to post back with more detailed information, we are willing to further investigate it.
Have a nice day!
Best regards,
Gloria
That's a long-standing bug in Word for Mac and Windows. But it has an easy fix.
- Click in the section just after the break that has gone wrong.
- Choose Format>Document from the macOS menu.
- Select the Layout tab.
- Change the Section start dropdown to be the correct section break type, then OK out.
Thank you. I will check this next time the problem emerges to see if it solves it. I've tried many things, but not this yet. Unfortunately, I have to wait until it spontaneously emerges again to check to see if it works.