Greyed out button for adding bookmarks in Microsoft Word

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This week, I finally put the finishing touches on a white paper I’ve been writing for my employer (once it’s published, I’m sure I’ll be linking to it). Usually, the stuff I write is fairly straightforward – nothing more complex than a Word document with associated styles, a table of contents, the odd field here and there, a few cross references. This time though, I found myself using some functionality that I’ve not used previously – like the citation/biblography functionality and also some bookmarks (to refer to sections of the document that weren’t labelled as headings or captions).

I couldn’t work out why adding bookmarks was not available (the Add button was greyed out) but the trick is to ensure that the bookmark name has no punctuation in it (except an underscore).

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