Rearranging the order of pages in Word 2010

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.

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- but Micro Soft is going to play a verbal shell game and say "This is a text flow program"?

I said that it is a text flow program, not Microsoft. This is not a shell game, it is a description of the program. Word doesn't even really seem to see pages as units until it is time to print them.

I did not say nor imply that MS Word is garbage. It is a very powerful program with very real limitations. I don't especially like everything about it, but I do use it on a daily basis and helps me do my job.

I do rearrange parts of documents a often, but not with most documents and not most of the time. I do it by having Heading Styles at the beginning of each logical part of the document. In the navigation pane I can move them around the same as I can move slides around in PowerPoint.  This is very easy in Word 2010 and later.

Moving pages around is not something that appeals to me. I sometimes do it in Acrobat, but then each page being moved has a separate purpose.

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

In the navigation pane you can drag and drop headings. Doing so moves everything between that heading and the next one of the same level. This is extremely powerful.