MS Word displaying page number before certain words

[Radoslav_Vladimirov]

Dear All,

Today I encountered something very strange with a Word document that I am still struggling to understand. Namely, I figured out that Word had inserted the page number before certain words in a document. It is in fact a non-printable item and when pasted as value, it is gone. My wild guess would be that the said words might have also been subject to spelling check by Word at some point. The problematic file itself is used by more than 30 people, with different language settings. Visually, it is as follows: 

Could you please advise where are these numbers coming from and how can I remove them in bulk? Your help is appreciated!

[#2]

Hello @Radoslav_Vladimirov ,

without seeing the entire document I can only guess. It appears as if the page number is in a box and that the properties of the box allow text to overflow the page-number box.

Can you click on the page-number and move it?

[#3]

Thank you for your input, Lenka. Unfortunately, the document is internal and I am not allowed to share it. Indeed, the numbers are in boxes, taking into account the visual borders. What I subsequently found is that the words concatenated to the said numbers (corresponding to the page number) are not actual words from the document text, but again - MS Word generated strings that tend to repeat.

[#4]

@Radoslav_Vladimirov 

Is the issue specific to that one document? Or can you reproduce it in other documents as well?

If the issue can be observed in other documents, does it occur in conjunction with specific actions (editing, printing, etc.)?

[#5]

Hi, Stefan! Thanks for joining the conversation. In fact, the same issue is available in other documents as well. I have not managed to catch the source of the issue yet. My wild guess would be something related to the higher number of texts in different languages and the MS Word proofing/spell check functionalities. Unfortunately, a lot of people use the affected documents and it is not easy to trace the source of the issue.

[#6]

@Radoslav_Vladimirov 

The page numbers are most likely in the footer area. Open the footer area by double clicking on the bottom of the page, and delete the box with the page number.

However!

That's not your problem. Your problem is that the text overflows into the footer, I think (based on the pictures). I assume your footers are mixed up a little, but without seeing the document, not easy to say what.

You might want to fix that rather than deleting page numbering.

Lenka

[#7]

Thank you, Lenka. Unfortunately, removing the page number in the footer or the whole footer including the page number do not have any effect. I cannot even understand what kind of object that number is, being framed as something special. The concatenated string following the number is also repetitive, but it is not framed. When pasted as value, this strange sequence of page number and string is disappears, but it has replaced a word from the actual text and this word is not there anymore, which is a big issue for me. As a result, the whole document needs to be reviewed in order to remove this "randomly" generated text and then add the respectively replaced original words.

[#8]

Hi @Radoslav_Vladimirov ,

In that case, we might need to look into the document.

Can you please take one and make it presentable? Replace random letters with other random letters so that the content is not readable/making sense? 

Or, if possible, take one of those documents, at the end insert random text typing

=rand(100,7)

and press <enter>. This will insert 100 paragraphs of 7 lines of random text.

Delete the sensitive content. Hopefully, this will retain the page number box but delete any sensitive data.

[#9]

@Radoslav_Vladimirov 

Are you running any add-ins in Word? Try options 6 and 7 in the article at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/word/issues-when-start-or-use-word to (temporarily) disable all add-ins and see if that improves the situation. 

[#10]

Thank you, Stefan. Please, pardon me for the delayed response - I was on a leave of absence. I did try your suggestion, but it did not solve the issue unfortunately.