How to display margins in Word 2013

The Text Boundary problem is another indication of Microsoft falling apart.  It is only a symptom, but Office 2010 had beautiful icons yet in Office 2013 they are crude and ugly.  Microsft stockmarket valuation went up $20 billiion when it was announced Ballmer would leave.  Let's hope things will get better in future.

Julian Nott Santa Barbara CA

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 "is doing 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."

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.

Show text boundaries is there, however, you must got to File, Save, and Save All Files in This Format, and select 97-2003 format.

 

The bad news - the cursor does not show at the left margin.

 

The good news - text boundaries are like they have been for years!  The other good news, Word Art is like is was prior to Office 2007!

 

Sure would be nice if MS got this right!  This is a mess without a cursor at the left margin!

 

Good luck.

Saving in the .doc format has the side effect of disabling new features like content controls and makes for larger files.

The change to WordArt began with Office 2010 and there are other work-arounds for that. Legacy WordArt Add-In for 2010-2013

Could it be you are looking for File menu > Options command > Advanced option > Show Document Content section. Turn ON "Show Text Boundaries".

No, that is already turned on.  The problem is that it shows lines between paragraphs, as well.

Could it be you are looking for File menu > Options command > Advanced option > Show Document Content section. Turn ON "Show Text Boundaries".