Rearranging the order of pages in Word 2010

Anonymous
2012-03-15T13:24:51+00:00

In Word 2010  can you sort pages like you can sort pages in Powerpoint by simply dragging and dropping ?  If not by dragging and dropping, how?

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Charles Kenyon 170.9K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2012-03-15T13:41:49+00:00

In Word 2010  can you sort pages like you can sort pages in Powerpoint by simply dragging and dropping ?  If not by dragging and dropping, how?

Nope.

Word is a text flow program. It prints text on pages but doesn't really organize by page. Powerpoint is a slide show program. It does organize by slides.

You can cut and paste text.

If you have used heading styles to organize your document, you can use the navigation pane to move logical sections around.

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Anonymous
2012-03-15T15:20:45+00:00

If each page begins with a heading  formatted with a page break before (instead of a manual page break between pages), you can switch to outline view, collapse the view to the heading level used at the tops of pages (say, heading 1), and move (by dragging or by cutting and pasting) the headings.  The content under the heading will move with them.  Also in outline view, you can sort the headings.   When cutting in outline view, you must include the heading's paragraph mark so that subheads and text will be included in the cut.  

The navigation pane also allows you to collapse or expand the heading levels shown and to drag headings to rearrange, but as far as I know, you cannot cut and paste to move headings and you cannot sort them.

HTH,

Pam

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  1. Paul Edstein 82,871 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2014-06-21T07:22:38+00:00

    So...what your saying is MS Word is Garbage because 99.99% of the document creating world is going to want to re-arrange pages in a document

    Your premise, like your conclusion is garbage. Very few Word users ever need to swap the page order of the content in a document. Do a web search and see how many posts you can find from people wanting to to this. Given Word has been around for over 30 years it's clear very few people have thought the lack of such a facility to be a significant weakness, if at all.

    As for the issue itself, how do you suppose Word is meant to what you want to do when you start trying to re-order pages with paragraphs or table cells spanning the page boundaries, or with a single table that spans three or more pages? With tables, for example, the first few rows might be heading rows, set to repeat on all pages, and there might be a one or more columns that span the entire remaining table height and other columns that don't. Then there's the question of what happens with Section breaks, changes in page layout, headers, footers and so on. Indeed, with Word, what appears on a given page on one PC might appear on a different page on another PC. You don't seem to have given much thought to the implications of what you expect Word to provide. The simple fact is no word processor is designed to re-order content by page. That's not word-processing is for. That said, Word provides plenty of tools for re-ordering content.

    Pam Caswell has already given one easy way of re-ordering a well-designed document. Word even gives you the tools to sort pages, if need be. See, for example: http://www.eileenslounge.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=11465.

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  2. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2014-06-21T07:15:38+00:00

    I would suggest that 99.99% of Word users would not give two hoots about not being able to re-arrange the order of pages in a document.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-06-21T05:19:10+00:00

    Just because it doesn't fit your profile of how a Word processor should work does not make it 'garbage'.

    There are no 'pages' in a word document. It is not a page layout application. It works by flowing text into predefined formats.

    If you want a page layout application, there are plenty of applications of that type available. See http://page-layout-software-review.toptenreviews.com/ but Word is not one of them.

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