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Updating Table of Figures doubles the entries every time; there are now 15 000 of them.

Anonymous
2021-08-14T10:06:50+00:00

Every time I try to update the table of figures, it adds more figures. As you can see below, there are now over 15 000, and I can not update it without Word trying to insert all 15 000, which just crashes it.

What could this be? Thanks in advance.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For business | Other

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  1. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 322.9K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2021-08-14T23:25:00+00:00

    Your document contains many instances of duplicate captions and instances of the captions not being numbered sequentially

    This has probably come about as a result of the captions being inserted into Shapes.

    To rectify the issue, the text wrapping of all of the figures was changed to In-Line with Text, the text of the caption was copied and the Shape that contained it was deleted and then the text of the caption was pasted into a paragraph inserted after the paragraph that contains the figure.

    A repaired copy of your document has been uploaded to the following folder of my OneDrive

    https://1drv.ms/f/s!AmuIXmFDy-1azRlX2JBMPPp_Nb1x

    or

    https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AFfYkEw8%2Dn81vXE&id=5AEDCB43615E886B%219881&cid=5AEDCB43615E886B

    Let me know when you have retrieved it so that I can delete it from that folder.

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  1. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 322.9K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2021-08-21T02:07:34+00:00

    Simply put the selection where you want the image and insert the image at that place. Format the paragraph containing the image so that it is kept with the next paragraph into which you insert the caption, directly, NOT in a text box.

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  2. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 322.9K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2021-08-15T06:59:43+00:00

    On other thing that I forgot to mention. All of the Section Breaks were removed from the document except for that before the first chapter and a StyleRef field was inserted into the Header of the second Section of the document so that the title of the chapter appears in the Header.

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  3. Charles Kenyon 166.7K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2021-08-14T18:18:40+00:00

    I next tried copying everything but the last paragraph mark from your document into a new document. Word stopped responding.

    I next tried copying section by section. No problems through Section 4. When I added Section 5, the proliferation of the Table of Figure entries recurred. Here is a temporary link to that document before updating the TOF. https://www.dropbox.com/s/zvjpz87sfepuqvl/deleteme.docx?dl=0

    I suspect that recourse is going to be needed to the XML of the document. I will pick this up later if no one else chimes in but have other obligations.

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  4. Charles Kenyon 166.7K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2021-08-14T16:48:57+00:00

    I tried deleting all bookmarks using a macro; I confirmed they were gone. Then I updated first the Table of Tables (quick) and then the Table of Figures.

    Same problem with TOF.

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