Rearranging the order of pages in Word 2010

You are wrong - not knowing how to do it (and now finding out I can't) is exactly why I am in the forum.  LOTS of people would like to be able to do that - especially business users. 

I think you are talking from a different, although valid, perspective. Doug, Paul, and Pam have been helping people use Word for a very long time. They've seen what problems most people are having and the estimate that 99.99% of users don't care about being able to rearrange pages is likely correct; it is based on observations and hard data. These people have addressed the concerns of thousands of users. Your observation, that you care about this ability and the lack of such an ability, is also valid. And, 0.01% of Word users is a LOT of people simply because there are a lot of Word users.

My observation, as both a user and someone who has been on these forums for a while, is that most Word users want to be able to type something and print it or send it to someone. They do not spend a lot of time editing or rearranging. If anything, many more people want to be able to move ideas around in a document, to make it more readable or persuasive.

The thing is, my understanding is that Word really does not know much about pages. For Word, they are a bi-product of printing the document. In ordinary word processing, text flows from page to page and when text is inserted something gets bumped to the next page. Margins are changed, text reflows.

Word does care about Sections and paragraphs. It keeps track of those every time you type something. It does care about headings using heading styles. It knows where these things are, all the time. Where pages are will change depending on your printer, your margins, your page orientation, and other factors. Word really does not decide where pages are in a document until it is time to print it.

Why use Microsoft Word’s built-in heading styles? by Shauna Kelly

If you organize your work using heading styles, those can easily be rearranged in a Word document, complete with lower-level text. You can set the formatting of a heading style to have a page break before it, if you wish; that way by telling Word to use that heading style, you also tell it to begin a new page. If you don't type too much text, everything under that heading will remain on one page. Such pages can be easily moved in the Navigation Pane or in Outline View. It is also easy to generate a linked Table of Contents and update it when things are moved. Word still isn't seeing "pages" when it moves something, it is seeing logical constructs that start with a heading style. However, that may do what you want.

If you cannot be troubled to use the tools Word provides or they do not work for you, perhaps a different program would suit you better. PowerPoint organizes things by slides. Text does not flow from slide to slide. If you add text in the middle of a slide, the following text may fall off the bottom, but it does not move to the next slide. Slides are easily rearranged.

Both PowerPoint and Word are complex programs. Both are easy to use to just produce a quick and dirty result. Both become a bit more difficult when you explore their limits. I have a much better understanding of Word but I don't really think anyone (including Word's designers) understands the entire program and the interrelationships of its functions.

Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word

Basic Formatting in Microsoft Word

Complex Documents

Sections / Headers and Footers in Microsoft Word 2007-2013

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.

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.