Crowdsourcing a Collaborative Project

For the past two months I have been struggling with a page numbering issue. I am on the very last part of the downhill slide of my D.Min. I have finished my doctoral ministry project and written the Project Report (some other seminaries call their D.min project reports dissertations – NOBTS does not). My report has been approved by my faculty mentor which leaves just three more steps:

  1. Send this to the Style Reader to check to make sure that I have done everything according to Turabian standards – Oh how I hate Kate Turabian
  2. Send the report to my doctoral board
  3. Defend this sucker.

I have been waiting to send the report to the Style Reader because I needed to work out how to do the page numbers on one appendix. The first appendix of my report is the approved proposal for the project. The page numbers in that proposal need to reflect both the original proposal’s page numbers and the Project Report’s page numbers. It should look like this.

page-number

 

I have asked for lots of help concerning these page numbers and I have received a lot of suggestions from people. Unfortunately none of them had worked in the past.

I became so frustrated a month ago that I asked a friend of mine who graduated last year how he did it. He told me he couldn’t figure it out and had to get a guy to do it for him. He sent me the guy’s number and I called him figuring he could walk me through the process. This is kind of a big deal for me. I usually can figure out what I need to do with computers and software. I have a bit of pride concerning this ability. Any how I humbled myself and called the guy. He told me it was too difficult to talk me through over the phone, but he would find a sample that would work with my report that I could copy and paste my stuff into. It would just take him a while because he was busy. So I thanked him, said I would look forward to his help when he could do it, and immediately emailed back my friend asking if I could get his Word file for his Project Report so I could just figure it out on my own. After a couple of weeks my friend forwarded me the file and I looked at it. It was absolutely no help because for some reason when I toggled the codes (Alt+F9) it would show the code for one page number and not the other. ARGH! I needed the codes for both page numbers.

I asked for help again from my Facebook and Twitter friends. I received more responses. Unfortunately once again none of them worked. So I waited for that one guy to send me a template to use. Today I thought I would give it another try and once again failed. When I posted my frustration on Facebook and Twitter I started receiving suggestions yet again. This time one worked. A college friend (thanks Jane) sent me a link that had a code I could manipulate to work. I SCREAMED! Seriously you can ask Pam. I screamed and danced. This was awesome. i now appreciate Jane for another reason other than introducing me to the Violent Femmes in college.

What is even more awesome is that my D.Min project is about collaborative sermon preparation and ultimately the report has been finished by collaboration. I love that.

SIDE NOTE – For anyone searching for the way to do these page numbers (basically NOBTS D.Min students) you just need this code:

{ PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT } [{= { PAGE }+68}]

You replace the “68” with the overall page at which your appendix starts. it was really that simple once I knew what to do.

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