UNHCE Information Technology & Distance Education Blog

Source: WordTips by DCI

Fields are a great boon for developing interactive documents. One
common use of fields is to create cross-references to other parts of a
document. When inserting a cross-reference field, you may have some
type of special identifying text that you need to always follow the
field. To keep the field and the identifying text together, you
separate the two by a non-breaking space.

Non-breaking spaces are used to control how Word automatically wraps
text at the end of a line. The non-breaking space ensures that the
text before the space and the text after the space are always on the
same line. In the case of fields, however, this doesn't seem to work.
Instead, Word blithely wraps text right at the non-breaking space.

This is frustrating, but it appears to be the way that Word is
designed. For some reason, the field before the non-breaking space is
not viewed as "text," so Word ignores the non-breaking space. The only
way around this is to create your document as you normally would (with
the cross-references), and then look through the document to find any
instances where the cross-reference is on one line and the identifying
text on the next. You can then insert a line break character just
before the field so that it is forced to the next line.

The drawback to this, obviously, is that if you edit your document or
if the cross-references change, you'll need to go through and remove
the line breaks to make sure that the text wrapping still makes sense.