Last Updated on August 14, 2016 by Dave Farquhar
I’m making some minor updates to the stylebook that my workplace’s technical writers use, and I ran across a weird problem. Some, but not all of the numbered headings had the numbers mashed up against the text. It didn’t the last time I looked at the document, but, guess what? That was when we were still running Word 2007.
It took some investigating, but I traced the problem to the margins. For some reason, Word 2010 decided to apply custom margins of 0.38 inches on the left and 1.0 inches on the top, bottom, and right. Moving the margins back to something more conventional fixed that issue for me.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
FWIW, I don’t think the problem is limited to OFF10 or even OFF07.
I’ve had wierd margin SNAFUS by just changing the page layout, and that’s when even normal.dot remains unchanged.
I suspect Word stores page layouts in a yet undiscovered file; my evidence comes from a pair of letterhead templates, one in A4 and the other in a standard 8½ x 11″. Using the A4 template messes up the 8½ x 11 on next use, yet the templates remain the same and undergo no change.
FWIW.
Jim`