Margins change between desktop and mobile

Formatting will vary between devices, because Word depends a lot on the current printer when creating the page layout. (Normally, the variations should be small, but there are cases when there might be bigger differences.)

To ensure that future employees see the same version of a document, convert it to PDF before sending it to them.

Doug, thank you. So, if I put a saddle intended for an elephant on a horse, the saddle will adjust itself automatically to the new beast? I think a better analogy to describe this situation is that I take a saddle from one horse, put it on another horse of the same size and in the process of moving from one to the other the saddle has changed size. I am a certified Java programmer, an ex-Systems Analyst and also an ex-IT salesman (ATM backbone networks).

And, no, If you send a resume to someone in simple image-style PDF (there are different types of PDF ranging from simple image to fully available text), depending on the version you send the ATS will recognise it or not at all with different parsing results in between - and don't gorget that there are different qualities of ATS on the market ranging from almost pointless to minutely intelligent. I'd much rather just send a doc or docx format and know that they are the best-parsed formats - I even found to my chagrin that the ODT format don't always work well with ATSs, no matter what they say.

Once again, here's another scenario (which I have encountered). I send my resume for a role. Later on I'm talking to someone and it transpires that the same resume would be of interest to them; I whip out my smartphone, open the document and share it by email or whatever method we agree on; the result is that they receive a document which does not look like the one I painstakingly produced. So, to repeat, do you recommend that every singe Word document I produce should be automatically saved in PDF format also, just in case, and even if I do that does it get through the ATS so that a recruiter will even deign to read half of it?

I can tell you the workaround I have adopted for now - never open a document from SkyDrive on my Smartphone to send it - just promise to send it later.

As you can see, the much-touted collaboration which Microsoft markets with Office everywhere (smartphone, tablet, desktop, etc) can not work if the documents are changed surreptitiously when opened depending on the device used.

You can also see that I have a workaround - I made my original post to see whether I was missing something, and in the event that this is a genuine bug then it should be brought to the attention of users and developers alike for their respective priorities. I would have preferred that I had missed something

Word for Android and Word on PC are two completely different animals.  An analogy would be to think of a Word document as a saddle and an Word for Android as a horse and Word on a PC as an Elephant.  While you could place the saddle on either, if it fits one, it is almost certainly not going to fit the other.

An if you are going to be sending documents to people who do not require to edit them, then yes, the best way to ensure that the recipients see the document in the way that you intend is to send it as PDF.

I agree that headers shouldn't be removed or added depending on the device you are using. But are you sure that the header is actually missing? Note that not all views display headers and footers. In desktop versions of Word you can choose Draft view which hides most of the layout, including headers and footers as well as many graphics.

Thank you, Stefan, but I don't think this is the issue.

à) Why would the current printer cause a header to be inserted? Page size and margins, perhaps, but inserting elements? It would be a bug if elements were actually added.

b) Microsoft Office is no all about collaboration - one of the major improvements touted by Microsoft for version 2016 is improved collaboration. Converting to PDF before send is contrary to the intended use of Office as a collaborative tool (as an MVP, please explain how the review system works if we collaborate between each share, which in any case eliminates the possibility of real-time collaboration).

In any case, converting to PDF doesn't help - see the following workflow:

I create document on desktop, store it on Skydrive, meet someone, open document during conversation on phone, discover document has changed before I can convert to PDF.

Any other ideas?