I just wrapped up my thesis-equivalent project¹, and over the course of it I learned a lot more about Microsoft Word than I ever knew before. It weighed in at about 90 pages, also making it the longest thing I’ve ever written.

Anyway, the very last thing I needed to do before submitting it was to update the index fields (my table of contents, table of figures, and table of tables). Since I used cross-references throughout the paper, I figured this would be straightforward. Control-click, select Update Fields…, and voilà:

Um… what happened to Figures 10, 12, 17, 19, 21, 32, and a few others? I did everything I could think of to restore them without any luck. I should say here that this was in Microsoft Word 2011 (the Mac version), so my gut was telling me that I should see what would happen if I used Word 2013 (for Windows):

…and, they’re back, confirming my opinion that Word is a piece of shit application. I saved the document with that change, and pulled it back over to the Mac. As long as I only let the table update the page numbers of the figures, things stayed ok.