Margins change between desktop and mobile

Anonymous
2015-10-01T18:01:52+00:00

I have taken a while to carefully sculpt an important document on desktop (my resume in fact). It took me a long time to squeeze it all onto 2 pages, adjusting the top and bottom margins, fonts, etc, to make it happen.

The strange thing is that when I look at the document on Office for Mobile (Android, Nexus 4 phone, Android 5.1.1), it overflows onto a third page and the margins look wrong, as if they are the default setting. When I save as a new document, the changes ae kept in the new document without me doing anything to insert them.

What I'm worrying about, apart from the fact that their is a format change between devices, is that if I open a document on mobile which made on desktop and then share it, I will be sending an unfaithful copy. Furthermore, it will definitely cause problems when people collaborate.

Having taken a couple of minutes to check before posting, I noticed that the new document saved on Android actually had a header inserted (I don't know why that would happen). When I remove the header, the document is now on 2 pages, but there has been a slight change (line 1 of page 2 has moved up to the bottom of page 1). I've checked - you can remove headers in Word for Android (painful but possible) but it has the same line-shift as I found on desktop.

Please, does anyone know how I can avoid Word for Android changing my document?

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  1. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-10-03T23:33:55+00:00

    When you start a new document, you will not see anything in the Header

    However, there is always an empty paragraph in the Header (and footer) of the document

    If in your "carefully crafted" document, you had the top or bottom margins set to be less than the distance specified for the Header (or Footer) from the edge of the page, under some circumstances, your margin settings will be over-ridden by the Header and Footer settings from the edge of the page.

    If you are going to set the margins to values that are less than the default distance of the Header or Footer from the edge of the page, you need to reduce that distance so that it does not affect the margin.

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  2. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-10-02T12:57:41+00:00

    Given the purpose of the document in question, saving it in pdf format would be more appropriate and should eliminate the problem

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-10-02T10:02:18+00:00

    Thanks, Doug, for your idea - I didn't know about that option. I checked on desktop and it's checked. I can't seem to find the option in Mobile for Android settings. Having looked at the info bubble, I see where you're coming from on that, but as it was already checked it's not the cause of this issue.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-10-02T09:58:23+00:00

    Thanks, Stefan. In fact, when I originally did the document on desktop, I had to make sure that I removed the header and footer otherwise it just wouldn't fit on 2 pages - I also had to reduce the top and bottom margins - so it's clear that there was no header in the original document. Yesterday, while typing the OP I thought of the header question, that's why I went back to check on the phone before posting, and, lo and behold, there was a header in the document I had just opened without editing  on my phone.

    I hardly ever use draft view because in everyday use I find no use for it - I prefer to do my documents in WYSIWYG, and I only use other views when I'm looking for a formatting issue.

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  5. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-10-02T09:30:45+00:00

    Make sure that on both computers, under File>Options>Display, there is a check mark in the box for "Show white space between pages in Print Layout view".

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