Could you conditionally edit a footer in Word 2003 ?

[arecube]

For example, if any page contains some red-color-text, could the right-most footer element on the 1st line ( a control number ) of a red-text containing page & the right-most footer element on the 2nd line ( a date ) of a red-text containing page - - each be replaced with their own literal ? A new control number or a different date (there would be only one new number or date used on all the changed footers within the document).

Most pages will not have red-text and their footer should be left untouched.


Blah blah blah <--in red text blah blah blah.

footer
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Vol...........................30- {Page} -...........................MO9072-001
...................................................................................3/22/2007

 

[Macropod]

Hi arecube,

There is no simple way to do this - and none that works reliably once edits in a document start changing which pages the reference text is on.

 

[arecube]

Macropod,
Thanks once again for your help. Your succinct answers helped us get back to real work in place of over-thinking and researching this.

We tried section breaks and tailoring footnotes. You "hit the nail on the head" for just as we finished, changes came in. Then people were getting lost in where they were in the process of making footnote edits and updating page numbers. Quite a mess and frustrating.
arecube

 

[Macropod]

FWIW, where I used to work, we did away with page-level versioning years ago. Instead, we went to chapter-level versioning (and eventually to whole-of-manual versioning), with all pages in the latest print getting the same version date.

To help readers identify the any new material, we used Word's 'track changes' feature, with the vertical bars in the margin, plus a revisions schedule that acted as a cover page to draw their attention to where the more significant changes could be found. Deletions weren't shown in the printed text (some organisations like to show them as struck out, but this gets messy when all that's really happened is the text has been re-arranged - we didn't even track that as a change). Then, once the latest version had been released, we 'accepted' all the tracked changes so that the next edition would only show whatever had been added since the last print.

Once everyone understood this was how the system worked, it worked well and we had no more problems with people having to add/remove individual pages and (inevitably) getting the updates into a mess over time.