Margins change between desktop and mobile

Doug,

That was my memory and belief as well. I had already written to KRS pointing out that he/she was ignoring your instructions to check that. It may well be that it is correct most of the time. However, before I said that, I tested in Word 2013. After I checked it in Word 2013, I changed the answer but posted another screen shot of the dialog.

In Word 2013 I accessed the header and created text there. I then returned to the body of the text and made some changes. Then I returned to the header Ctrl+A, Del. When I returned to the body the header was no longer taking up space.

Margins are set to .2 inches. Header and footer distance is set to .5 from edge. You can find this document here.

One thing I did not try was saving with the header before deleting it.

Edit: Same result upon saving with a header, closing, reopening, and deleting the header. No room taken for header.

Document 2013

Just tried with Word 2010 and had same result. document 2010

Also, this was not tried with any alternative headers (first-page/odd-page) in the document.

You continue to overlook the fact that on the Layout tab of the page setup dialog, there is a setting for the distance of the header and footer from the top of the page.  I previously included a screen shot of that dialog that showed the default settings of 12.7mm.

As I have pointed out in my response to Charles Kenyon's belief that that setting is irrelevant in Word 2013, once the Header\Footer pane has been accessed, as appatently it was in your case to remove the header, there will always be an empty paragraph in the header and footer and the distance of that paragraph from the edge of the page will be the distance specified on the Layout tab of the Page Setup dialog.  If that distance is more than the margin setting, the margin can be offset. 

While that may not happen on the computer on which the document was created, it will most definitely occur when the document is re-laid out on another device.

And that is why after you save the document as document y on the Android and then open that document y on the PC you then see the space being taken up by the header.

Here is a question for you:  What do you mean when you say "when I remove a header I do so by removing the element itself"?

Once the header pane has been accessed, there will be an empty paragraph ¶ in it and you cannot remove it via the User Interface, or for that matter by accessing the document xml.

Hi Charles,

Once the Header\Footer pane has been accessed, as appatently it was in this case to remove the header, there will always be an empty paragraph in the header and footer and the distance of that paragraph from the edge of the page will be the distance specified on the Layout tab of the Page Setup dialog.  If that distance is more than the margin setting, the margin can be offset. 

While that may not happen on the computer on which the document was created, it will most definitely occur if the document is re-laid out on another device.

If you want to send me a copy of the document (you can remove private material) I will take a look at it.

Again, I could not reproduce your problem using Word 2013 on my computer and Word for Android on my phone using Dropbox as storage.

I was going to point out that you haven't answered the question about the setting for header distance from the edge, but as far as I can tell, in Word 2013, this setting has no effect if there is nothing in the header. You may as well check it, too, though.

Thanks for trying, Charles. 0.2 inches is 5mm. You do give a valid new parameter - Dropbox rather than SkyDrive (view probably, hopefully won't change anything). I'll take a look at that next.

Sorry to say, but I'll leave it for tomorrow now.