How to display margins in Word 2013

OK, the info didn't come directly from MS.  Maybe I misunderstood what you quoted in October 2013 in this forum:

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**http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office\_2013\_release-word/how-to-display-margins-in-word-2013/50b69ab3-f9bd-47ff-81bb-dad1cbe8ea51**

  >

Unfortunately, as you have discovered, text boundaries in Word 2013 are useless. This is due to the new layout engine used in Word 2013. It turns out that Word's developers had no idea that so many users depended on

text boundaries, which we have been told were kind of a mistake to begin with,

"a feature that was never supposed to be a feature," "a window into the internals of word" that should probably never have been exposed to users.

The feature "just draws a border around [Word's] internal drawing rectangles," and those have now changed with the switch to a hardware-accelerated display. So Word "isdoing precisely what it has always done (drawing borders around internal data structures). Unfortunately, this means that scenarios that used to work accidentally now don’t work the same way. There’s really no way to bring back the old functionality – it truly doesn’t exist."

</snip>

I don't think MS has ever said the previous functionality was "broken." They've said they exposed something in the object model that was not meant to be a "feature." When they changed the graphics engine, that changed.

I just upgraded from Word 2007 to Word 2013.  In the 2007 version, I could display the margins but I haven't been able to find how to do that in Word 2013.  Does anyone know?  Clicking on "show text boundaries" seems to put a lot of lines in the document only.

You are like the rest of the informed users of MS Word, prvious to 2013.  While apparently this is a design by MS, no one can tell the users why it was removed.  However, it has been reported the "text boundaries" are not scheduled to return - ever.

What I have read is that MS says that the way that the 'text boundaries" feature worked prior to Office 2013 was "broken".  It was NOT working as designed.  When they changed the "drawing" engine used to paint Word files on the screen the "fixed" the problem. 

So as far MS is concerned the text boundaries are now "working properly". They have not plans to "fix" them to work the old way, regardless of how much users complain about it.  For us users, we have to consider the new way is not a "BUG" but a "FAD". It is Failing As Designed <grin>.

Charles Kenyon's "workaround" to use Office 2010 compatibility mode is as good as it gets. But as he notes, it disables all new "2013" features. On the other hand, for most "normal" users, there are not all that many 2013 "new" features that they would miss <grin>.

While this is helpful, it is still not what the original poster was asking about.

I believe what you want is under options, then display, then under display there is an option "show white space between pages in print Layout view." Click that and you will be able to see the whole page, and a small space in between (like in Word 2007) instead of just jumping straight from words to more words on a new page, separated by only a small line.