Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Cross-References don't show up in Word's dialog box?

I was having an issue with a manuscript I'm putting together recently.  I was passing it back and forth with my advisor, and I was using Track Changes.  As I added some figures with captions, I then wanted to refer to those figures in the text via a cross-reference.

When I clicked on Insert -> Cross-Reference in Word 2010, the recently-inserted captions weren't in the list!



Ugh, *another* Word screwup with complex documents.

Well, after a lost day of screwing around with the problem (and sleeping on it), I came across the solution.

The problem seems to be that Word doesn't like you to insert your figures and captions as a "tracked change".  I went back and "accepted" all my insertions of figures and captions.  And, voila!  The figures now show up in the cross-reference dialog box.  Now, whenever I insert a new figure, I'll either turn off track changes for the moment, or just go back and accept the insertion.

Hope this helped somebody else!