How to display margins in Word 2013

Anonymous
2013-01-31T16:21:55+00:00

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.

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-04-27T22:16:03+00:00

    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>.

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  2. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-04-27T23:06:27+00:00

    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.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-04-28T00:40:28+00:00

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

    <snip

    **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>

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  4. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-04-28T01:35:14+00:00

    There's a difference between something that was inadvertent or unintentional to begin with or "a mistake" and something that was "broken."

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-04-28T02:07:49+00:00

    As a computer programmer, I was taught to categorize a part of a program that did something inadvertent or unintentional as a "bug".  And calling something a bug (in my book) is synonymous with saying that the program is broken.  Broken does not mean that the program has to crash/abend, just that it simply is not giving the desired result. 

    I think we are generally in the same ball park.

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