Before you attempt to make an ebook, remove all the hidden data and personal information from the Word document. This will remove things like page headers, footers, bookmarks, comments and page numbers so it’s essential to do this on a new copy of the document rather than the copy you use for making printed books. To do this in Word 2007+, use the Document Inspector.

1. Open the Word document copy that you want to inspect for hidden data and personal information.
2. In the copy, click the ‘File’ tab, and then select the ‘Info’ tab.
3. Click ‘Check for Issues’, and then click ‘Inspect Document’.
4. In the Document Inspector dialog box, select everything found
5. Click ‘Inspect’.
6. Review the results of the inspection in the Document Inspector dialog box and click each of the ‘Remove All’ buttons.
7. Save your document.

It’s particularly important that you remove all bookmarks since some versions of Word can create multiple bookmarks at the same point. These play havoc when generating a table of contents. Apparently Word doesn’t discard old bookmarks when you create a new one in the same position